Project description:The ubiquity of RNA-seq has led to many methods that use RNA-seq data to analyze variations in RNA splicing. However, available methods are not well suited for handling heterogeneous and large datasets. Such datasets scale to thousands of samples across dozens of experimental conditions, exhibit increased variability compared to biological replicates, and involve thousands of unannotated splice variants resulting in increased transcriptome complexity. We describe here a suite of algorithms and tools implemented in the MAJIQ v2 package to address challenges in detection, quantification, and visualization of splicing variations from such datasets. Using both large scale synthetic data and GTEx v8 as benchmark datasets, we assess the advantages of MAJIQ v2 compared to existing methods. We then apply MAJIQ v2 package to analyze differential splicing across 2,335 samples from 13 brain subregions, demonstrating its ability to offer insights into brain subregion-specific splicing regulation.
Project description:Single-cell RNA sequencing has led to unprecedented levels of data complexity. Although several computational platforms are available, performing data analyses for multiple datasets remains a significant challenge. Here, we provide a comprehensive analytical protocol to interrogate multiple datasets on SingCellaR, an analysis package in R. This tool can be applied to general single-cell transcriptome analyses. We demonstrate steps for data analyses and visualization using bespoke pipelines, in conjunction with existing analysis tools to study human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Roy et al. (2021).
Project description:Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies allow numerous opportunities for revealing novel and potentially unexpected biological discoveries. scRNA-seq clustering helps elucidate cell-to-cell heterogeneity and uncover cell subgroups and cell dynamics at the group level. Two important aspects of scRNA-seq data analysis were introduced and discussed in the present review: relevant datasets and analytical tools. In particular, we reviewed popular scRNA-seq datasets and discussed scRNA-seq clustering models including K-means clustering, hierarchical clustering, consensus clustering, and so on. Seven state-of-the-art scRNA clustering methods were compared on five public available datasets. Two primary evaluation metrics, the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) and the Normalized Mutual Information (NMI), were used to evaluate these methods. Although unsupervised models can effectively cluster scRNA-seq data, these methods also have challenges. Some suggestions were provided for future research directions.
Project description:RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) is a widely used approach for accessing the transcriptome in biomedical research. Studies frequently include multiple samples taken from the same individual at various time points or under different conditions, correct assignment of those samples to each particular participant is evidently of great importance. Here, we propose taking advantage of typing the highly polymorphic genes from the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) complex in order to verify the correct allocation of RNA-seq samples to individuals. We introduce RNA2HLA, a novel quality control (QC) tool for performing study-wide HLA-typing for RNA-seq data and thereby identifying the samples from the common source. RNA2HLA allows precise allocation and grouping of RNA samples based on their HLA types. Strikingly, RNA2HLA revealed wrongly assigned samples from publicly available datasets and thereby demonstrated the importance of this tool for the quality control of RNA-seq studies. In addition, our tool successfully extracts HLA alleles in four-digital resolution and can be used to perform massive HLA-typing from RNA-seq based studies, which will serve multiple research purposes beyond sample QC.
Project description:MotivationStatistical methods development for differential expression analysis of RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) requires software tools to assess accuracy and error rate control. Since true differential expression status is often unknown in experimental datasets, artificially constructed datasets must be utilized, either by generating costly spike-in experiments or by simulating RNA-seq data.ResultsPolyester is an R package designed to simulate RNA-seq data, beginning with an experimental design and ending with collections of RNA-seq reads. Its main advantage is the ability to simulate reads indicating isoform-level differential expression across biological replicates for a variety of experimental designs. Data generated by Polyester is a reasonable approximation to real RNA-seq data and standard differential expression workflows can recover differential expression set in the simulation by the user.Availability and implementationPolyester is freely available from Bioconductor (http://bioconductor.org/).Contactjtleek@gmail.comSupplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Project description:SummaryWe present 'Threshold-seq,' a new approach for determining thresholds in deep-sequencing datasets of short RNA transcripts. Threshold-seq addresses the critical question of how many reads need to support a short RNA molecule in a given dataset before it can be considered different from 'background.' The proposed scheme is easy to implement and incorporate into existing pipelines.Availability and implementationSource code of Threshold-seq is freely available as an R package at: http://cm.jefferson.edu/threshold-seq/.Contactisidore.rigoutsos@jefferson.edu.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Project description:Although the number of RNA-Seq datasets deposited publicly has increased over the past few years, incomplete annotation of the associated metadata limits their potential use. Because of the importance of RNA splicing in diseases and biological processes, we constructed a database called SFMetaDB by curating datasets related with RNA splicing factors. Our effort focused on the RNA-Seq datasets in which splicing factors were knocked-down, knocked-out or over-expressed, leading to 75 datasets corresponding to 56 splicing factors. These datasets can be used in differential alternative splicing analysis for the identification of the potential targets of these splicing factors and other functional studies. Surprisingly, only ?15% of all the splicing factors have been studied by loss- or gain-of-function experiments using RNA-Seq. In particular, splicing factors with domains from a few dominant Pfam domain families have not been studied. This suggests a significant gap that needs to be addressed to fully elucidate the splicing regulatory landscape. Indeed, there are already mouse models available for ?20 of the unstudied splicing factors, and it can be a fruitful research direction to study these splicing factors in vitro and in vivo using RNA-Seq.
Project description:BACKGROUND:With the recent proliferation of single-cell RNA-Seq experiments, several methods have been developed for unsupervised analysis of the resulting datasets. These methods often rely on unintuitive hyperparameters and do not explicitly address the subjectivity associated with clustering. RESULTS:In this work, we present DendroSplit, an interpretable framework for analyzing single-cell RNA-Seq datasets that addresses both the clustering interpretability and clustering subjectivity issues. DendroSplit offers a novel perspective on the single-cell RNA-Seq clustering problem motivated by the definition of "cell type", allowing us to cluster using feature selection to uncover multiple levels of biologically meaningful populations in the data. We analyze several landmark single-cell datasets, demonstrating both the method's efficacy and computational efficiency. CONCLUSION:DendroSplit offers a clustering framework that is comparable to existing methods in terms of accuracy and speed but is novel in its emphasis on interpretabilty. We provide the full DendroSplit software package at https://github.com/jessemzhang/dendrosplit .
Project description:Trans-splicing mechanisms have been documented in many lineages that are widely distributed phylogenetically, including dinoflagellates. The spliced leader (SL) sequence itself is conserved in dinoflagellates, although its gene sequences and arrangements have diversified within or across different species. In this study, we present 18 Fugacium kawagutii SL genes identified from stranded RNA-seq reads. These genes typically have a single SL but can contain several partial SLs with lengths ranging from 103 to 292 bp. Unexpectedly, we find the SL gene transcripts contain sequences upstream of the canonical SL, suggesting that generation of mature transcripts will require additional modifications following trans-splicing. We have also identified 13 SL-like genes whose expression levels and length are comparable to Dino-SL genes. Lastly, introns in these genes were identified and a new site for Sm-protein binding was proposed. Overall, this study provides a strategy for fast identification of SL genes and identifies new sequences of F. kawagutii SL genes to supplement our understanding of trans-splicing.
Project description:Integration of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) datasets has become a standard part of the analysis, with conditional variational autoencoders (cVAE) being among the most popular approaches. Increasingly, researchers are asking to map cells across challenging cases such as cross-organs, species, or organoids and primary tissue, as well as different scRNA-seq protocols, including single-cell and single-nuclei. Current computational methods struggle to harmonize datasets with such substantial differences, driven by technical or biological variation. Here, we propose to address these challenges for the popular cVAE-based approaches by introducing and comparing a series of regularization constraints. The two commonly used strategies for increasing batch correction in cVAEs, that is Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL) regularization strength tuning and adversarial learning, suffer from substantial loss of biological information. Therefore, we adapt, implement, and assess alternative regularization strategies for cVAEs and investigate how they improve batch effect removal or better preserve biological variation, enabling us to propose an optimal cVAE-based integration strategy for complex systems. We show that using a VampPrior instead of the commonly used Gaussian prior not only improves the preservation of biological variation but also unexpectedly batch correction. Moreover, we show that our implementation of cycle-consistency loss leads to significantly better biological preservation than adversarial learning implemented in the previously proposed GLUE model. Additionally, we do not recommend relying only on the KL regularization strength tuning for increasing batch correction, as it removes both biological and batch information without discriminating between the two. Based on our findings, we propose a new model that combines VampPrior and cycle-consistency loss. We show that using it for datasets with substantial batch effects improves downstream interpretation of cell states and biological conditions. To ease the use of the newly proposed model, we make it available in the scvi-tools package as an external model named sysVI. Moreover, in the future, these regularization techniques could be added to other established cVAE-based models to improve the integration of datasets with substantial batch effects.