Abstract
Single-cell RNA-sequencing data have significantly advanced the characterization of cell-type diversity and composition. However, cell-type definitions vary across data and analysis pipelines, raising concerns about cell-type validity and generalizability. With MetaNeighbor, we proposed an efficient and robust quantification of cell-type replicability that preserves dataset independence and is highly scalable compared to dataset integration. In this protocol, we show how MetaNeighbor can be used to characterize cell-type replicability by following a simple three-step procedure: gene filtering, neighbor voting and visualization. We show how these steps can be tailored to quantify cell-type replicability, determine gene sets that contribute to cell-type identity and pretrain a model on a reference taxonomy to rapidly assess newly generated data. The protocol is based on an open-source R package available from Bioconductor and GitHub, requires basic familiarity with Rstudio or the R command line and can typically be run in <5 min for millions of cells.
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Data availability
The datasets analyzed in the protocol are all previously published and publicly available. Human pancreas datasets were from Baron et al.33 (Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) accession code GSE84133), Lawlor et al.34 (GEO accession code GSE86473), Muraro et al.35 (GEO accession code GSE85241) and Segerstolpe et al.36 (ArrayExpress accession code E-MTAB-5061). These datasets are accessed through the Bioconductor scRNAseq library in the protocol. The mouse primary visual cortex dataset was from Tasic et al.32 (GEO accession code GSE71585), accessed through the Bioconductor scRNAseq library. The BICCN dataset for the mouse primary motor cortex from Yao et al.4 is available on the Neuroscience Multi-Omic archive (https://assets.nemoarchive.org/dat-ch1nqb7). The subset of the BICCN data necessary to run the protocol is also available on FigShare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13020569 (R version) and https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13034171 (Python version).
Code availability
The code for the procedures (including all figures) is freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/gillislab/MetaNeighbor-Protocol in multiple formats (Rmd, PDF and jupyter notebook for R and Python). The scripts used to generate the protocol data are available in the same repository. The stable R version of MetaNeighbor is available through Bioconductor (https://www.bioconductor.org/install/) at https://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/MetaNeighbor.html (the protocol was generated by using version 3.12), and the development versions are available on GitHub at https://github.com/gillislab/MetaNeighbor (R version) and https://github.com/gillislab/pyMN (Python version).
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Acknowledgements
J.G. was supported by NIH grants R01MH113005 and R01LM012736. S.F. was supported by NIH grant U19MH114821. B.D.H. was supported by the CSHL Crick Cray Fellowship. M.C. was supported by NIH grant K99MH120050.
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S.F., M.C., B.D.H. and J.G. designed the experiments, performed the data analysis and wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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The authors declare no competing interests.
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Peer review information Nature Protocols thanks Praneet Chaturvedi, Guoji Guo, Ahmed Mahfouz, Nathan Salomonis and Daniel Schnell for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Related links
Key references using this protocol
Crow, M. et al. Nat. Commun. 9, 884 (2018): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03282-0
Paul, A. et al. Cell 171, 522–539.e20 (2017): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2017.08.032
Yao, Z. et al. Preprint at bioRxiv (2020): https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.29.970558
Bakken, T. E. et al. Preprint at bioRxiv (2020): https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.31.016972
Key data used in this protocol
Yao, Z. et al. Preprint at bioRxiv (2020) https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.29.970558
Baron, M. et al. Cell Syst. 3, 346–360.e4 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2016.08.011
Lawlor, N. et al. Genome Res. 27, 208–222 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.212720.116
Muraro, M. J. et al. Cell Syst. 3, 385–394.e3 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2016.09.002
Segerstolpe, Å. et al. Cell Metab. 24, 593–607 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2016.08.020
Tasic, B. et al. Nat. Neurosci. 19, 335–346 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4216
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Fischer, S., Crow, M., Harris, B.D. et al. Scaling up reproducible research for single-cell transcriptomics using MetaNeighbor. Nat Protoc 16, 4031–4067 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41596-021-00575-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41596-021-00575-5
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