CellChat

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.

Single-cell RNA sequencing methods can profile the transcriptomes of single cells but cannot preserve spatial information. Conversely, spatial transcriptomics assays can profile spatial regions in tissue sections but do not have single-cell resolution. Here, Runmin Wei (Siyuan He, Shanshan Bai, Emi Sei, Min Hu, Alastair Thompson, Ken Chen, Savitri Krishnamurthy & Nicholas E. Navin) developed a computational method called CellTrek that combines these two datasets to achieve single-cell spatial mapping through coembedding and metric learning approaches. They benchmarked CellTrek using simulation and in situ hybridization datasets, which demonstrated its accuracy and robustness. They then applied CellTrek to existing mouse brain and kidney datasets and showed that CellTrek can detect topological patterns of different cell types and cell states. They performed single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics experiments on two ductal carcinoma in situ tissues and applied CellTrek to identify tumor subclones that were restricted to different ducts, and specific T-cell states adjacent to the tumor areas.

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.

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) technology has allowed to capture of topographical gene expression profiling of tumor tissues, but single-cell resolution is potentially lost. Identifying cell identities in ST datasets from tumors or other samples remains challenging for existing cell-type deconvolution methods. Spatial Cellular Estimator for Tumors (SpaCET) is an R package for analyzing cancer ST datasets to estimate cell lineages and intercellular interactions in the tumor microenvironment. Generally, SpaCET infers the malignant cell fraction through a gene pattern dictionary, then calibrates local cell densities and determines immune and stromal cell lineage fractions using a constrained regression model. Finally, the method can reveal putative cell-cell interactions in the tumor microenvironment. In this notebook, we will illustrate an example workflow for cell type deconvolution and interaction analysis on breast cancer ST data from 10X Visium. The notebook is inspired by SpaCET's vignettes and modified to demonstrate how the tool works on BioTuring's platform.