CellChat

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.

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).

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.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data often encountered technical artifacts called "doublets" which are two cells that are sequenced under the same cellular barcode. Doublets formed from different cell types or states are called heterotypic and homotypic otherwise. These factors constrain cell throughput and may result in misleading biological interpretations. DoubletFinder (McGinnis, Murrow, and Gartner 2019) is one of the methods proposed for doublet detection. In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow of DoubletFinder. We use a 10x Genomics dataset which captures peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from a healthy donor stained with a panel of 31 TotalSeq™-B antibodies (BioLegend).