A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
Benchmarking methods for detecting differential states between conditions from multi-subject single-cell RNA-seq data
Authors: Junttila Sini, Smolander Johannes, Elo Laura L.
Publisher: OXFORD UNIV PRESS
Publication year: 2022
Journal: Briefings in Bioinformatics
Journal name in source: BRIEFINGS IN BIOINFORMATICS
Journal acronym: BRIEF BIOINFORM
Number of pages: 14
ISSN: 1467-5463
eISSN: 1477-4054
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbac286
Web address : https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbac286
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/176235024
Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) enables researchers to quantify transcriptomes of thousands of cells simultaneously and study transcriptomic changes between cells. scRNA-seq datasets increasingly include multisubject, multicondition experiments to investigate cell-type-specific differential states (DS) between conditions. This can be performed by first identifying the cell types in all the subjects and then by performing a DS analysis between the conditions within each cell type. Naive single-cell DS analysis methods that treat cells statistically independent are subject to false positives in the presence of variation between biological replicates, an issue known as the pseudoreplicate bias. While several methods have already been introduced to carry out the statistical testing in multisubject scRNA-seq analysis, comparisons that include all these methods are currently lacking. Here, we performed a comprehensive comparison of 18 methods for the identification of DS changes between conditions from multisubject scRNA-seq data. Our results suggest that the pseudobulk methods performed generally best. Both pseudobulks and mixed models that model the subjects as a random effect were superior compared with the naive single-cell methods that do not model the subjects in any way. While the naive models achieved higher sensitivity than the pseudobulk methods and the mixed models, they were subject to a high number of false positives. In addition, accounting for subjects through latent variable modeling did not improve the performance of the naive methods.
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