Dataset Information

ScSensitiveGeneDefine: sensitive gene detection in single-cell RNA sequencing data by Shannon entropy.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is the most widely used technique to obtain gene expression profiles from complex tissues. Cell subsets and developmental states are often identified via differential gene expression patterns. Most of the single-cell tools utilized highly variable genes to annotate cell subsets and states. However, we have discovered that a group of genes, which sensitively respond to environmental stimuli with high coefficients of variation (CV), might impose overwhelming influences on the cell type annotation.

Result

In this research, we developed a method, based on the CV-rank and Shannon entropy, to identify these noise genes, and termed them as "sensitive genes". To validate the reliability of our methods, we applied our tools in 11 single-cell data sets from different human tissues. The results showed that most of the sensitive genes were enriched pathways related to cellular stress response. Furthermore, we noticed that the unsupervised result was closer to the ground-truth cell labels, after removing the sensitive genes detected by our tools.

Conclusion

Our study revealed the prevalence of stochastic gene expression patterns in most types of cells, compared the differences among cell marker genes, housekeeping genes (HK genes), and sensitive genes, demonstrated the similarities of functions of sensitive genes in various scRNA-seq data sets, and improved the results of unsupervised clustering towards the ground-truth labels. We hope our method would provide new insights into the reduction of data noise in scRNA-seq data analysis and contribute to the development of better scRNA-seq unsupervised clustering algorithms in the future.

SUBMITTER: Chen Z

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8063398 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Background: Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has rapidly gained popularity for profiling transcriptomes of hundreds to thousands of single cells. This technology has led to the discovery of novel cell types and revealed insights into the development of complex tissues. However, many technical challenges need to be overcome during data generation. Due to minute amounts of starting material, samples undergo extensive amplification, increasing technical variability. A solution for mitigating amplification biases is to include unique molecular identifiers (UMIs), which tag individual molecules. Transcript abundances are then estimated from the number of unique UMIs aligning to a specific gene, with PCR duplicates resulting in copies of the UMI not included in expression estimates. Methods: Here we investigate the effect of gene length bias in scRNA-Seq across a variety of datasets that differ in terms of capture technology, library preparation, cell types and species. Results: We find that scRNA-seq datasets that have been sequenced using a full-length transcript protocol exhibit gene length bias akin to bulk RNA-seq data. Specifically, shorter genes tend to have lower counts and a higher rate of dropout. In contrast, protocols that include UMIs do not exhibit gene length bias, with a mostly uniform rate of dropout across genes of varying length. Across four different scRNA-Seq datasets profiling mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs), we found the subset of genes that are only detected in the UMI datasets tended to be shorter, while the subset of genes detected only in the full-length datasets tended to be longer. Conclusions: We find that the choice of scRNA-seq protocol influences the detection rate of genes, and that full-length datasets exhibit gene-length bias. In addition, despite clear differences between UMI and full-length transcript data, we illustrate that full-length and UMI data can be combined to reveal the underlying biology influencing expression of mESCs.