- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10176993
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Bioinformatics
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- Supplement_1
- ISSN:
- 1367-4803
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- i292 to i299
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Birol, Inanc (Ed.)Abstract Motivation Quantification estimates of gene expression from single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data have inherent uncertainty due to reads that map to multiple genes. Many existing scRNA-seq quantification pipelines ignore multi-mapping reads and therefore underestimate expected read counts for many genes. alevin accounts for multi-mapping reads and allows for the generation of ‘inferential replicates’, which reflect quantification uncertainty. Previous methods have shown improved performance when incorporating these replicates into statistical analyses, but storage and use of these replicates increases computation time and memory requirements. Results We demonstrate that storing only the mean and variance from a set of inferential replicates (‘compression’) is sufficient to capture gene-level quantification uncertainty, while reducing disk storage to as low as 9% of original storage, and memory usage when loading data to as low as 6%. Using these values, we generate ‘pseudo-inferential’ replicates from a negative binomial distribution and propose a general procedure for incorporating these replicates into a proposed statistical testing framework. When applying this procedure to trajectory-based differential expression analyses, we show false positives are reduced by more than a third for genes with high levels of quantification uncertainty. We additionally extend the Swish method to incorporate pseudo-inferential replicates and demonstrate improvements in computation time and memory usage without any loss in performance. Lastly, we show that discarding multi-mapping reads can result in significant underestimation of counts for functionally important genes in a real dataset. Availability and implementation makeInfReps and splitSwish are implemented in the R/Bioconductor fishpond package available at https://bioconductor.org/packages/fishpond. Analyses and simulated datasets can be found in the paper’s GitHub repo at https://github.com/skvanburen/scUncertaintyPaperCode. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.more » « less
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Abstract Summary 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 information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Abstract Motivation High-throughput mRNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is a powerful tool for quantifying gene expression. Identification of transcript isoforms that are differentially expressed in different conditions, such as in patients and healthy subjects, can provide insights into the molecular basis of diseases. Current transcript quantification approaches, however, do not take advantage of the shared information in the biological replicates, potentially decreasing sensitivity and accuracy.
Results We present a novel hierarchical Bayesian model called Differentially Expressed Isoform detection from Multiple biological replicates (DEIsoM) for identifying differentially expressed (DE) isoforms from multiple biological replicates representing two conditions, e.g. multiple samples from healthy and diseased subjects. DEIsoM first estimates isoform expression within each condition by (1) capturing common patterns from sample replicates while allowing individual differences, and (2) modeling the uncertainty introduced by ambiguous read mapping in each replicate. Specifically, we introduce a Dirichlet prior distribution to capture the common expression pattern of replicates from the same condition, and treat the isoform expression of individual replicates as samples from this distribution. Ambiguous read mapping is modeled as a multinomial distribution, and ambiguous reads are assigned to the most probable isoform in each replicate. Additionally, DEIsoM couples an efficient variational inference and a post-analysis method to improve the accuracy and speed of identification of DE isoforms over alternative methods. Application of DEIsoM to an hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) dataset identifies biologically relevant DE isoforms. The relevance of these genes/isoforms to HCC are supported by principal component analysis (PCA), read coverage visualization, and the biological literature.
Availability and implementation The software is available at https://github.com/hao-peng/DEIsoM
Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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