Cancer Institute / Harvard SPH @stephaniehicks Spring 2017 Single-Cell Sequencing Nanocourse March 7, 2017 If you want to follow along, my slides & code are available here: https://github.com/stephaniehicks/singlecellnano2017 1
used to sequence single-cells • ApplicaDons of scRNA-Seq data • Biological versus technical variability • Raw, noisy data à clean data? (e.g. quality control, normalizaDon) • Intro to experimental design (from the staDsDcal perspecDve) • How batch effects can occur in single-cell RNA-Seq data • A case study using R/Bioconductor
(2015). Molecular Cell 58 CharacterizaDon of cell type populaDons IdenDfy cell type populaDons (e.g. dim reducDon or clustering) DifferenDal splicing between populaDons IdenDfy allele-specific expression IdenDfy genes that drive a process across Dme 8
Global scaling factors mostly developed for bulk RNA-Seq • Number of zeros (see Lun et al., 2016. Genome Biology) • With Spike-ins or UMIs – Spike-ins: theoreDcally a good idea, but many challenges sDll remain for scRNA-Seq (see Stegle et al., 2015, Tung et al., 2016); ConflicDng view points on if ERCCs are appropriate – UMIs: Reduces amplificaDon bias, not appropriate for isoform or allele-specific expression • Biological (nuisance?) variability – differences among cells in cell-cycle stage or cell size 13
for batch effects have been around for many years (lots of places to start). Bad news: Poor experimental design is a big limiDng factor. …. also, more complicated because of sparsity (biology and technology), capture efficiency, etc Good news: Increase awareness about good experimental design. New methods specific for scRNA-Seq are being developed. Batch effects can be a big problem in scRNA-Seq data (but not always). 28
unconfounded study design Data from Tung et al. (2017) Scien8fic Reports Complete analysis in R Markdown on GitHub here: h]ps://github.com/stephaniehicks/singlecellnano2017 30