Identifying gene expression programs of cell-type identity and cellular activity with single-cell RNA-Seq

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Cite this article as: eLife 2019;8:e43803 doi: 10.7554/eLife.43803

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Abstract

Identifying gene expression programs underlying both cell-type identity and cellular activities (e.g. life-cycle processes, responses to environmental cues) is crucial for understanding the organization of cells and tissues. Although single-cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-Seq) can quantify transcripts in individual cells, each cell's expression profile may be a mixture of both types of programs, making them difficult to disentangle. Here we benchmark and enhance the use of matrix factorization to solve this problem. We show with simulations that a method we call consensus non-negative matrix factorization (cNMF) accurately infers identity and activity programs, including their relative contributions in each cell. To illustrate the insights this approach enables, we apply it to published brain organoid and visual cortex scRNA-Seq datasets; cNMF refines cell types and identifies both expected (e.g. cell cycle and hypoxia) and novel activity programs, including programs that may underlie a neurosecretory phenotype and synaptogenesis.

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Dylan Kotliar

Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States

For correspondence
dylan_kotliar@hms.harvard.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7968-645X
Adrian Veres

Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
M Aurel Nagy

Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Shervin Tabrizi

Viral Computational Genomics, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Eran Hodis

Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Douglas A Melton

Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1623-5504
Pardis C Sabeti

Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32GM007753)

Dylan Kotliar
Adrian Veres
M Aurel Nagy
Eran Hodis

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (R01AI099210)

Pardis C Sabeti

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (HHSF223201810172C)

Dylan Kotliar
Pardis C Sabeti

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Reviewing Editor

Alfonso Valencia, Barcelona Supercomputing Center - BSC, Spain

Publication history

Received: November 21, 2018
Accepted: July 7, 2019
Accepted Manuscript published: July 8, 2019 (version 1)
Version of Record published: July 18, 2019 (version 2)

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.