Understanding global communications among cells requires accurate representation of cell-cell signaling links and effective systems-level analyses of those links.
We construct a database of interactions among ligands, receptors and their cofactors that accurately represent known heteromeric molecular complexes. We then develop **CellChat**, a tool that is able to quantitatively infer and analyze intercellular communication networks from single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data.
CellChat predicts major signaling inputs and outputs for cells and how those cells and signals coordinate for functions using network analysis and pattern recognition approaches. Through manifold learning and quantitative contrasts, CellChat classifies signaling pathways and delineates conserved and context-specific pathways across different datasets.
Applying **CellChat** to mouse and human skin datasets shows its ability to extract complex signaling patterns.
Single-cell RNA sequencing methods can profile the transcriptomes of single cells but cannot preserve spatial information. Conversely, spatial transcriptomics assays can profile spatial regions in tissue sections but do not have single-cell resolution.
Here, Runmin Wei (Siyuan He, Shanshan Bai, Emi Sei, Min Hu, Alastair Thompson, Ken Chen, Savitri Krishnamurthy & Nicholas E. Navin) developed a computational method called CellTrek that combines these two datasets to achieve single-cell spatial mapping through coembedding and metric learning approaches. They benchmarked CellTrek using simulation and in situ hybridization datasets, which demonstrated its accuracy and robustness.
They then applied CellTrek to existing mouse brain and kidney datasets and showed that CellTrek can detect topological patterns of different cell types and cell states. They performed single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics experiments on two ductal carcinoma in situ tissues and applied CellTrek to identify tumor subclones that were restricted to different ducts, and specific T-cell states adjacent to the tumor areas.
Spatial transcriptomic studies are becoming increasingly common and large, posing important statistical and computational challenges for many analytic tasks. Here, we present SPARK-X, a non-parametric method for rapid and effective detection of spatially expressed genes in large spatial transcriptomic studies.
SPARK-X not only produces effective type I error control and high power but also brings orders of magnitude computational savings. We apply SPARK-X to analyze three large datasets, one of which is only analyzable by SPARK-X. In these data, SPARK-X identifies many spatially expressed genes including those that are spatially expressed within the same cell type, revealing new biological insights.
Advances in multi-omics have led to an explosion of multimodal datasets to address questions from basic biology to translation. While these data provide novel opportunities for discovery, they also pose management and analysis challenges, thus motivating the development of tailored computational solutions. `muon` is a Python framework for multimodal omics.
It introduces multimodal data containers as `MuData` object. The package also provides state of the art methods for multi-omics data integration. `muon` allows the analysis of both unimodal omics and multimodal omics.
scGen is a generative model to predict single-cell perturbation response across cell types, studies and species (Nature Methods, 2019). scGen is implemented using the scvi-tools framework.
What you can do with scGen:
Train on a dataset with multiple cell types and conditions and predict the perturbation effect on the cell type which you only have in one condition. This scenario can be extended to multiple species where you want to predict the effect of a specific species using another or all the species.
Train on a dataset where you have two conditions (e.g. control and perturbed) and predict on second dataset with similar genes.
Remove batch effect on labeled data. In this scenario you need to provide cell_type and batch labels to the method. Note that batch_removal does not require all cell types to be present in all datasets (batches). If you have dataset specific cell type it will preserved as before.
We assume there exist two conditions in you dataset (e.g. control and perturbed). You can train the model and with your data and predict the perturbation for the cell type/species of interest.
We recommend to use normalized data for the training. A simple example for normalization can be performed using scanpy