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Computational methods that model how the gene expression of a cell is influenced by interacting cells are lacking. We present NicheNet, a method that predicts ligand–target links between interacting cells by combining their expression data with prior knowledge of signaling and gene regulatory networks. We applied NicheNet to the tumor and immune cell microenvironment data and demonstrated that NicheNet can infer active ligands and their gene regulatory effects on interacting cells.

Expanded CRISPR-compatible CITE-seq (ECCITE-seq) which is built upon pooled CRISPR screens, allows to simultaneously measure transcriptomes, surface protein levels, and single-guide RNA (sgRNA) sequences at single-cell resolution. The technique enables multimodal characterization of each perturbation and effect exploration. However, it also encounters heterogeneity and complexity which can cause substantial noise into downstream analyses. Mixscape (Papalexi, Efthymia, et al., 2021) is a computational framework proposed to substantially improve the signal-to-noise ratio in single-cell perturbation screens by identifying and removing confounding sources of variation. In this notebooks, we demonstrate Mixscape's features using pertpy - a Python package offering a range of tools for perturbation analysis. The original pipeline of Mixscape implemented in R can be found here.

InferCNV is used to explore tumor single cell RNA-Seq data to identify evidence for somatic large-scale chromosomal copy number alterations, such as gains or deletions of entire chromosomes or large segments of chromosomes. This is done by exploring expression intensity of genes across positions of tumor genome in comparison to a set of reference 'normal' cells. A heatmap is generated illustrating the relative expression intensities across each chromosome, and it often becomes readily apparent as to which regions of the tumor genome are over-abundant or less-abundant as compared to that of normal cells. **Infercnvpy** is a scalable python library to infer copy number variation (CNV) events from single cell transcriptomics data. It is heavliy inspired by InferCNV, but plays nicely with scanpy and is much more scalable.

The recent development of experimental methods for measuring chromatin state at single-cell resolution has created a need for computational tools capable of analyzing these datasets. Here we developed Signac, a framework for the analysis of single-cell chromatin data, as an extension of the Seurat R toolkit for single-cell multimodal analysis. **Signac** enables an end-to-end analysis of single-cell chromatin data, including peak calling, quantification, quality control, dimension reduction, clustering, integration with single-cell gene expression datasets, DNA motif analysis, and interactive visualization. Furthermore, Signac facilitates the analysis of multimodal single-cell chromatin data, including datasets that co-assay DNA accessibility with gene expression, protein abundance, and mitochondrial genotype. We demonstrate scaling of the Signac framework to datasets containing over 700,000 cells.