Gene regulatory network reconstruction using single-cell RNA sequencing of barcoded genotypes in diverse environments

Abstract

Understanding how gene expression programs are controlled requires identifying regulatory relationships between transcription factors and target genes. Gene regulatory networks are typically constructed from gene expression data acquired following genetic perturbation or environmental stimulus. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) captures the gene expression state of thousands of individual cells in a single experiment, offering advantages in combinatorial experimental design, large numbers of independent measurements, and accessing the interaction between the cell cycle and environmental responses that is hidden by population-level analysis of gene expression. To leverage these advantages, we developed a method for scRNAseq in budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). We pooled diverse transcriptionally barcoded gene deletion mutants in 11 different environmental conditions and determined their expression state by sequencing 38,285 individual cells. We benchmarked a framework for learning gene regulatory networks from scRNAseq data that incorporates multitask learning and constructed a global gene regulatory network comprising 12,228 interactions.

Data availability

Sequencing data has been deposited in GEO: GSE125162Figures 2-7 (& Supplemental Figures 2-7) are generated from a single R markdown document. The scripts and all data necessary to do this analysis are provided as Supplemental Data 1. The raw output (knit HTML file) is provided as Supplemental Data 6.Interactive versions of several figures are available have been made available with the Shiny library in R: http://shiny.bio.nyu.edu/cj59/YeastSingleCell2019/The Inferelator package is available on GitHub and through python package managers (i.e. pip) under an open source license (BSD).

The following data sets were generated
The following previously published data sets were used

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Christopher A Jackson

    Center For Genomics and Systems Biology, New York University, New York, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8769-2710
  2. Dayanne M Castro

    Department of Biology, New York University, New York, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Giuseppe-Antonio Saldi

    Department of Biology, New York University, New York, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Richard Bonneau

    Center For Genomics and Systems Biology, New York University, New York, United States
    For correspondence
    bonneau@nyu.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  5. David Gresham

    Center For Genomics and Systems Biology, New York University, New York, United States
    For correspondence
    dgresham@nyu.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-4028-0364

Funding

National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (R01DK103358)

  • Richard Bonneau

National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01GM107466)

  • David Gresham

National Science Foundation (MCB1818234)

  • David Gresham

Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD096770)

  • Richard Bonneau

National Science Foundation (IOS1546218)

  • Richard Bonneau

National Cancer Institute (R01CA229235)

  • Richard Bonneau

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

Copyright

© 2020, Jackson et al.

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.

Metrics

  • 28,098
    views
  • 2,122
    downloads
  • 121
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Christopher A Jackson
  2. Dayanne M Castro
  3. Giuseppe-Antonio Saldi
  4. Richard Bonneau
  5. David Gresham
(2020)
Gene regulatory network reconstruction using single-cell RNA sequencing of barcoded genotypes in diverse environments
eLife 9:e51254.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.51254

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.51254

Further reading

    1. Computational and Systems Biology
    2. Microbiology and Infectious Disease
    Priya M Christensen, Jonathan Martin ... Kelli L Palmer
    Research Article

    Bacterial membranes are complex and dynamic, arising from an array of evolutionary pressures. One enzyme that alters membrane compositions through covalent lipid modification is MprF. We recently identified that Streptococcus agalactiae MprF synthesizes lysyl-phosphatidylglycerol (Lys-PG) from anionic PG, and a novel cationic lipid, lysyl-glucosyl-diacylglycerol (Lys-Glc-DAG), from neutral glycolipid Glc-DAG. This unexpected result prompted us to investigate whether Lys-Glc-DAG occurs in other MprF-containing bacteria, and whether other novel MprF products exist. Here, we studied protein sequence features determining MprF substrate specificity. First, pairwise analyses identified several streptococcal MprFs synthesizing Lys-Glc-DAG. Second, a restricted Boltzmann machine-guided approach led us to discover an entirely new substrate for MprF in Enterococcus, diglucosyl-diacylglycerol (Glc2-DAG), and an expanded set of organisms that modify glycolipid substrates using MprF. Overall, we combined the wealth of available sequence data with machine learning to model evolutionary constraints on MprF sequences across the bacterial domain, thereby identifying a novel cationic lipid.

    1. Computational and Systems Biology
    2. Neuroscience
    Bernhard Englitz, Sahar Akram ... Shihab Shamma
    Research Article

    Perception can be highly dependent on stimulus context, but whether and how sensory areas encode the context remains uncertain. We used an ambiguous auditory stimulus – a tritone pair – to investigate the neural activity associated with a preceding contextual stimulus that strongly influenced the tritone pair’s perception: either as an ascending or a descending step in pitch. We recorded single-unit responses from a population of auditory cortical cells in awake ferrets listening to the tritone pairs preceded by the contextual stimulus. We find that the responses adapt locally to the contextual stimulus, consistent with human MEG recordings from the auditory cortex under the same conditions. Decoding the population responses demonstrates that cells responding to pitch-changes are able to predict well the context-sensitive percept of the tritone pairs. Conversely, decoding the individual pitch representations and taking their distance in the circular Shepard tone space predicts the opposite of the percept. The various percepts can be readily captured and explained by a neural model of cortical activity based on populations of adapting, pitch and pitch-direction cells, aligned with the neurophysiological responses. Together, these decoding and model results suggest that contextual influences on perception may well be already encoded at the level of the primary sensory cortices, reflecting basic neural response properties commonly found in these areas.