Benchmarking single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) and single-cell Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (scATAC-seq) computational tools demands simulators to generate realistic sequencing reads. However, none of the few read simulators aim to mimic real data. To fill this gap, we introduce scReadSim, a single-cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq read simulator that allows user-specified ground truths and generates synthetic sequencing reads (in a FASTQ or BAM file) by mimicking real data. At both read-sequence and read-count levels, scReadSim mimics real scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq data. Moreover, scReadSim provides ground truths, including unique molecular identifier (UMI) counts for scRNA-seq and open chromatin regions for scATAC-seq. In particular, scReadSim allows users to design cell-type-specific ground-truth open chromatin regions for scATAC-seq data generation. In benchmark applications of scReadSim, we show that UMI-tools achieves the top accuracy in scRNA-seq UMI deduplication, and HMMRATAC and MACS3 achieve the top performance in scATAC-seq peak calling.
With the advancements of high-throughput single-cell RNA-sequencing protocols, there has been a rapid increase in the tools available to perform an array of analyses on the gene expression data that results from such studies. For example, there exist methods for pseudo-time series analysis, differential cell usage, cell-type detection RNA-velocity in single cells, etc. Most analysis pipelines validate their results using known marker genes (which are not widely available for all types of analysis) and by using simulated data from gene-count-level simulators. Typically, the impact of using different read-alignment or unique molecular identifier (UMI) deduplication methods has not been widely explored. Assessments based on simulation tend to start at the level of assuming a simulated count matrix, ignoring the effect that different approaches for resolving UMI counts from the raw read data may produce. Here, we present minnow, a comprehensive sequence-level droplet-based single-cell RNA-sequencing (dscRNA-seq) experiment simulation framework. Minnow accounts for important sequence-level characteristics of experimental scRNA-seq datasets and models effects such as polymerase chain reaction amplification, cellular barcodes (CB) and UMI selection and sequence fragmentation and sequencing. It also closely matches the gene-level ambiguity characteristics that are observed in real scRNA-seq experiments. Using minnow, we explore the performance of some common processing pipelines to produce gene-by-cell count matrices from droplet-bases scRNA-seq data, demonstrate the effect that realistic levels of gene-level sequence ambiguity can have on accurate quantification and show a typical use-case of minnow in assessing the output generated by different quantification pipelines on the simulated experiment.
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10425971
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Bioinformatics
- Volume:
- 35
- Issue:
- 14
- ISSN:
- 1367-4803
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. i136-i144
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Availability and implementation The source code of QUBIC2 is freely available at https://github.com/OSU-BMBL/QUBIC2.
Contact czhang87@iu.edu or qin.ma@osumc.edu
Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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