splatter

Single-cell mRNA sequencing can uncover novel cell-to-cell heterogeneity in gene expression levels in seemingly homogeneous populations of cells. However, these experiments are prone to high levels of technical noise, creating new challenges for identifying genes that show genuine heterogeneous expression within the population of cells under study. BASiCS (Bayesian Analysis of Single-Cell Sequencing data) is an integrated Bayesian hierarchical model to perform statistical analyses of single-cell RNA sequencing datasets in the context of supervised experiments (where the groups of cells of interest are known a priori, e.g. experimental conditions or cell types). BASiCS performs built-in data normalisation (global scaling) and technical noise quantification (based on spike-in genes). BASiCS provides an intuitive detection criterion for highly (or lowly) variable genes within a single group of cells. Additionally, BASiCS can compare gene expression patterns between two or more pre-specified groups of cells. Unlike traditional differential expression tools, BASiCS quantifies changes in expression that lie beyond comparisons of means, also allowing the study of changes in cell-to-cell heterogeneity. The latter can be quantified via a biological over-dispersion parameter that measures the excess of variability that is observed with respect to Poisson sampling noise, after normalisation and technical noise removal. Due to the strong mean/over-dispersion confounding that is typically observed for scRNA-seq datasets, BASiCS also tests for changes in residual over-dispersion, defined by residual values with respect to a global mean/over-dispersion trend.

RNA abundance and cell size parameters could improve RNA-seq deconvolution algorithms to more accurately estimate cell type proportions given the different cell type transcription activity levels. A Total RNA Expression Gene (TREG) can facilitate estimating total RNA content using single molecule fluorescent in situ hybridization (smFISH). We developed a data-driven approach using a measure of expression invariance to find candidate TREGs in postmortem human brain single nucleus RNA-seq. This R package implements the method for identifying candidate TREGs from snRNA-seq data.

bambu is a R package for multi-sample transcript discovery and quantification using long read RNA-Seq data. You can use bambu after read alignment to obtain expression estimates for known and novel transcripts and genes. The output from bambu can directly be used for visualisation and downstream analysis such as differential gene expression or transcript usage.

Single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) is widely used to investigate the composition of complex tissues since the technology allows researchers to define cell-types using unsupervised clustering of the transcriptome. However, due to differences in experimental methods and computational analyses, it is often challenging to directly compare the cells identified in two different experiments. scmap is a method for projecting cells from a scRNA-seq experiment on to the cell-types or individual cells identified in a different experiment.

Like all gene expression data, single-cell data suffers from batch effects and other unwanted variations that makes accurate biological interpretations difficult. The scMerge method leverages factor analysis, stably expressed genes (SEGs) and (pseudo-) replicates to remove unwanted variations and merge multiple single-cell data. This package contains all the necessary functions in the scMerge pipeline, including the identification of SEGs, replication-identification methods, and merging of single-cell data.

Methods to infer clonal tree configuration for a population of cells using single-cell RNA-seq data (scRNA-seq), and possibly other data modalities. Methods are also provided to assign cells to inferred clones and explore differences in gene expression between clones. These methods can flexibly integrate information from imperfect clonal trees inferred based on bulk exome-seq data, and sparse variant alleles expressed in scRNA-seq data. A flexible beta-binomial error model that accounts for stochastic dropout events as well as systematic allelic imbalance is used.