Biology subjects

Quin F Wills

Publications and source records attributed to Quin F Wills.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2016

scater: pre-processing, quality control, normalisation and visualisation of single-cell RNA-seq data in R

MotivationSingle-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is increasingly used to study gene expression at the level of individual cells. However, preparing raw sequence data for further analysis is not a straightforward process. Biases, artifacts, and other sources of unwanted variation are present in the data, requiring substantial time and effort to be spent on pre-processing, quality control (QC) and normalisation.\n\nResultsWe have developed the R/Bioconductor package scater to facilitate rigorous pre-processing, quality control, normalisation and visualisation of scRNA-seq data. The package provides a convenient, flexible workflow to process raw sequencing reads into a high-quality expression dataset ready for downstream analysis. scater provides a rich suite of plotting tools for single-cell data and a flexible data structure that is compatible with existing tools and can be used as infrastructure for future software development.\n\nAvailabilityThe open-source code, along with installation instructions, vignettes and case studies, is available through Bioconductor at http://bioconductor.org/packages/scater.\n\nSupplementary informationSupplementary material is available online at bioRxiv accompanying this manuscript, and all materials required to reproduce the results presented in this paper are available at dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.60139.

Bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2016

Isoform-level gene expression patterns in single-cell RNA-sequencing data

RNA-sequencing of single-cells enables characterization of transcriptional heterogeneity in seemingly homogenous cell populations. In this study we propose and apply a novel method, ISOform-Patterns (ISOP), based on mixture modeling, to characterize the expression patterns of pairs of isoforms from the same gene in single-cell isoform-level expression data. We define six principal patterns of isoform expression relationships and introduce the concept of differential pattern analysis. We applied ISOP for analysis of single-cell RNA-sequencing data from a breast cancer cell line, with replication in two independent datasets. In the primary dataset we detected and assigned pattern type of 16562 isoform-pairs from 4929 genes. Our results showed that 78% of the isoform pairs displayed a mutually exclusive expression pattern, 14% of the isoform pairs displayed bimodal isoform preference and 8% isoform pairs displayed isoform preference. 26% of the isoform-pair patterns were significant, while remaining isoform-pair patterns can be understood as effects of transcriptional bursting, drop-out and biological heterogeneity. 32% of genes discovered through differential pattern analysis were novel and not detected by differential expression analysis. ISOP provides a novel approach for characterization of isoform-level expression in single-cell populations. Our results reveal a common occurrence of isoform-level preference, commitment and heterogeneity in single-cell populations.

Bioinformatics↗