CellChat

The recent development of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology has enabled us to infer cell-type-specific co-expression networks, enhancing our understanding of cell-type-specific biological functions. However, existing methods proposed for this task still face challenges due to unique characteristics in scRNA-seq data, such as high sequencing depth variations across cells and measurement errors. CS-CORE (Su, C., Xu, Z., Shan, X. et al., 2023), an R package for cell-type-specific co-expression inference, explicitly models sequencing depth variations and measurement errors in scRNA-seq data. In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow of CS-CORE using a dataset of Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells (PBMC) from COVID patients and healthy controls (Wilk et al., 2020). The notebook content is inspired by CS-CORE's vignette and modified to demonstrate how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.

Classification of tumor and normal cells in the tumor microenvironment from scRNA-seq data is an ongoing challenge in human cancer study. Copy number karyotyping of aneuploid tumors (***copyKAT***) (Gao, Ruli, et al., 2021) is a method proposed for identifying copy number variations in single-cell transcriptomics data. It is used to predict aneuploid tumor cells and delineate the clonal substructure of different subpopulations that coexist within the tumor mass. In this notebook, we will illustrate a basic workflow of CopyKAT based on the tutorial provided on CopyKAT's repository. We will use a dataset of triple negative cancer tumors sequenced by 10X Chromium 3'-scRNAseq (GSM4476486) as an example. The dataset contains 20,990 features across 1,097 cells. We have modified the notebook to demonstrate how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.

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.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data have allowed us to investigate cellular heterogeneity and the kinetics of a biological process. Some studies need to understand how cells change state, and corresponding genes during the process, but it is challenging to track the cell development in scRNA-seq protocols. Therefore, a variety of statistical and computational methods have been proposed for lineage inference (or pseudotemporal ordering) to reconstruct the states of cells according to the developmental process from the measured snapshot data. Specifically, lineage refers to an ordered transition of cellular states, where individual cells represent points along. pseudotime is a one-dimensional variable representing each cell’s transcriptional progression toward the terminal state. Slingshot which is one of the methods suggested for lineage reconstruction and pseudotime inference from single-cell gene expression data. In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow for cell lineage and pseudotime inference using Slingshot. The notebook is inspired by Slingshot's vignette and modified to demonstrate how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.