MAST: a flexible statistical framework for assessing transcriptional changes and characterizing heterogeneity in single-cell RNA sequencing data

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Date Issued
2015-12-10Related DOI
10.1186/s13059-015-0844-5Author
Finak, Greg
McDavid, Andrew
Yajima, Masanao
Deng, Jingyuan
Gersuk, Vivian
Shalek, Alex K.
Slichter, Chloe K.
Miller, Hannah W.
McElrath, M. Juliana
Prlic, Martin
Linsley, Peter S.
Gottardo, Raphael
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https://hdl.handle.net/2144/27896Citation
Greg Finak, Andrew McDavid, Masanao Yajima, Jingyuan Deng, Vivian Gersuk, Alex K Shalek, Chloe K Slichter, Hannah W Miller, M Juliana McElrath, Martin Prlic, Peter S Linsley, Raphael Gottardo. 2015. "MAST: a flexible statistical framework for assessing transcriptional changes and characterizing heterogeneity in single-cell RNA sequencing data.." Genome Biol, Volume 16: 278.Abstract
Single-cell transcriptomics reveals gene expression heterogeneity but suffers from stochastic dropout and characteristic bimodal expression distributions in which expression is either strongly non-zero or non-detectable. We propose a two-part, generalized linear model for such bimodal data that parameterizes both of these features. We argue that the cellular detection rate, the fraction of genes expressed in a cell, should be adjusted for as a source of nuisance variation. Our model provides gene set enrichment analysis tailored to single-cell data. It provides insights into how networks of co-expressed genes evolve across an experimental treatment. MAST is available at https://github.com/RGLab/MAST .