학술논문

Identifying signaling genes in spatial single-cell expression data.
Document Type
Article
Source
Bioinformatics. 4/1/2021, Vol. 37 Issue 7, p968-975. 8p.
Subject
*CELL communication
*GENES
*DATA analysis
Language
ISSN
1367-4803
Abstract
Motivation Recent technological advances enable the profiling of spatial single-cell expression data. Such data present a unique opportunity to study cell–cell interactions and the signaling genes that mediate them. However, most current methods for the analysis of these data focus on unsupervised descriptive modeling, making it hard to identify key signaling genes and quantitatively assess their impact. Results We developed a M ixture of E xperts for S patial S ignaling genes I dentification (MESSI) method to identify active signaling genes within and between cells. The mixture of experts strategy enables MESSI to subdivide cells into subtypes. MESSI relies on multi-task learning using information from neighboring cells to improve the prediction of response genes within a cell. Applying the methods to three spatial single-cell expression datasets, we show that MESSI accurately predicts the levels of response genes, improving upon prior methods and provides useful biological insights about key signaling genes and subtypes of excitatory neuron cells. Availability and implementation MESSI is available at: https://github.com/doraadong/MESSI Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]