Bayesian Analysis of Single-Cell Sequencing data
Description
Single-cell mRNA sequencing can uncover novel cell-to-cell
heterogeneity in gene expression levels in seemingly homogeneous
populations of cells. However, these experiments are prone to high levels
of unexplained technical noise, creating new challenges for identifying
genes that show genuine heterogeneous expression within the population of
cells under study. BASiCS (Bayesian Analysis of Single-Cell Sequencing
data) is an integrated Bayesian hierarchical model where: (ii)
cell-specific normalization constants are estimated as part of the model
parameters, (ii) technical variability is quantified based on spike-in
genes that are artificially introduced to each analysed cells lysate and
(iii) the total variability of the expression counts is decomposed into
technical and biological components. BASiCS also provides an intuitive
detection criterion for highly (or lowly) variable genes within the
population of cells under study. This is formalized by means of tail
posterior probabilities associated to high (or low) biological cell-to-cell
variance contributions, quantities that can be easily interpreted by
applied users.