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




AuthorsJunttila Sini, Smolander Johannes, Elo Laura L.

PublisherOXFORD UNIV PRESS

Publication year2022

JournalBriefings in Bioinformatics

Journal name in sourceBRIEFINGS IN BIOINFORMATICS

Journal acronymBRIEF BIOINFORM

Number of pages14

ISSN1467-5463

eISSN1477-4054

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbac286

Web address https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbac286

Self-archived copy’s web addresshttps://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/176235024


Abstract

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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Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 20:53