Recent technological advancements have enabled spatially resolved transcriptomic profiling but at multi-cellular pixel resolution, thereby hindering the identification of cell-type-specific spatial patterns and gene expression variation.
To address this challenge, we develop STdeconvolve as a reference-free approach to deconvolve underlying cell types comprising such multi-cellular pixel resolution spatial transcriptomics (ST) datasets. Using simulated as well as real ST datasets from diverse spatial transcriptomics technologies comprising a variety of spatial resolutions such as Spatial Transcriptomics, 10X Visium, DBiT-seq, and Slide-seq, we show that STdeconvolve can effectively recover cell-type transcriptional profiles and their proportional representation within pixels without reliance on external single-cell transcriptomics references.
**STdeconvolve** provides comparable performance to existing reference-based methods when suitable single-cell references are available, as well as potentially superior performance when suitable single-cell references are not available.
STdeconvolve is available as an open-source R software package with the source code available at https://github.com/JEFworks-Lab/STdeconvolve .
Cell2location is a principled Bayesian model that can resolve fine-grained cell types in spatial transcriptomic data and create comprehensive cellular maps of diverse tissues. Cell2location accounts for technical sources of variation and borrows statistical strength across locations, thereby enabling the integration of single cell and spatial transcriptomics with higher sensitivity and resolution than existing tools. This is achieved by estimating which combination of cell types in which cell abundance could have given the mRNA counts in the spatial data, while modelling technical effects (platform/technology effect, contaminating RNA, unexplained variance).
This tutorial shows how to use cell2location method for spatially resolving fine-grained cell types by integrating 10X Visium data with scRNA-seq reference of cell types. Cell2location is a principled Bayesian model that estimates which combination of cell types in which cell abundance could have given the mRNA counts in the spatial data, while modelling technical effects (platform/technology effect, contaminating RNA, unexplained variance).
Build single-cell trajectories with the software that introduced **pseudotime**. Find out about cell fate decisions and the genes regulated as they're made.
Group and classify your cells based on gene expression. Identify new cell types and states and the genes that distinguish them.
Find genes that vary between cell types and states, over trajectories, or in response to perturbations using statistically robust, flexible differential analysis.
In development, disease, and throughout life, cells transition from one state to another. Monocle introduced the concept of **pseudotime**, which is a measure of how far a cell has moved through biological progress.
Many researchers are using single-cell RNA-Seq to discover new cell types. Monocle 3 can help you purify them or characterize them further by identifying key marker genes that you can use in follow-up experiments such as immunofluorescence or flow sorting.
**Single-cell trajectory analysis** shows how cells choose between one of several possible end states. The new reconstruction algorithms introduced in Monocle 3 can robustly reveal branching trajectories, along with the genes that cells use to navigate these decisions.
Charting an organs’ biological atlas requires us to spatially resolve the entire single-cell transcriptome, and to relate such cellular features to the anatomical scale. Single-cell and single-nucleus RNA-seq (sc/snRNA-seq) can profile cells comprehensively, but lose spatial information.
Spatial transcriptomics allows for spatial measurements, but at lower resolution and with limited sensitivity. Targeted in situ technologies solve both issues, but are limited in gene throughput. To overcome these limitations we present Tangram, a method that aligns sc/snRNA-seq data to various forms of spatial data collected from the same region, including MERFISH, STARmap, smFISH, Spatial Transcriptomics (Visium) and histological images.
**Tangram** can map any type of sc/snRNA-seq data, including multimodal data such as those from SHARE-seq, which we used to reveal spatial patterns of chromatin accessibility. We demonstrate Tangram on healthy mouse brain tissue, by reconstructing a genome-wide anatomically integrated spatial map at single-cell resolution of the visual and somatomotor areas.
Monorail can be used to process local and/or private data, allowing results to be directly compared to any study in recount3. Taken together, Monorail-pipeline tools help biologists maximize the utility of publicly available RNA-seq data, especially to improve their understanding of newly collected data.
This is for helping potential users of the Monorail RNA-seq processing pipeline (alignment/quantification) get started running their own data through it.