CellChat

Power analyses are considered important factors in designing high-quality experiments. However, such analyses remain a challenge in single-cell RNA-seq studies due to the presence of hierarchical structure within the data (Zimmerman et al., 2021). As cells sampled from the same individual share genetic and environmental backgrounds, these cells are more correlated than cells sampled from different individuals. Currently, most power analyses and hypothesis tests (e.g., differential expression) in scRNA-seq data treat cells as if they were independent, thus ignoring the intra-sample correlation, which could lead to incorrect inferences. Hierarchicell (Zimmerman, K.D. and Langefeld, C.D., 2021) is an R package proposed to estimate power for testing hypotheses of differential expression in scRNA-seq data while considering the hierarchical correlation structure that exists in the data. The method offers four important categories of functions: data loading and cleaning, empirical estimation of distributions, simulating expression data, and computing type 1 error or power. In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow of Hierarchicell. The notebook is inspired by Hierarchicell's vignette and modified to demonstrate how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.

Single-cell RNA-seq datasets in diverse biological and clinical conditions provide great opportunities for the full transcriptional characterization of cell types. However, the integration of these datasets is challeging as they remain biological and techinical differences. **Harmony** is an algorithm allowing fast, sensitive and accurate single-cell data integration.

Tumors are complex tissues of cancerous cells surrounded by a heterogeneous cellular microenvironment with which they interact. Single-cell sequencing enables molecular characterization of single cells within the tumor. However, cell annotation—the assignment of cell type or cell state to each sequenced cell—is a challenge, especially identifying tumor cells within single-cell or spatial sequencing experiments. Here, we propose ikarus, a machine learning pipeline aimed at distinguishing tumor cells from normal cells at the single-cell level. We test ikarus on multiple single-cell datasets, showing that it achieves high sensitivity and specificity in multiple experimental contexts. **InferCNV** is a Bayesian method, which agglomerates the expression signal of genomically adjointed genes to ascertain whether there is a gain or loss of a certain larger genomic segment. We have used **inferCNV** to call copy number variations in all samples used in the manuscript.

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 .