Back

Tracking single cell evolution via clock-like chromatin accessibility

Xiao, Y.; Jin, W.; Ju, L.; Fu, J.; Wang, G.; Yu, M.; Chen, F.; Qian, K.; Wang, X.; Zhang, Y.

2024-01-06 bioinformatics
10.1101/2022.05.12.491736 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Single cell chromatin accessibility sequencing (scATAC) reconstructs developmental trajectory by phenotypic similarity. However, inferring the exact developmental trajectory is challenging. Here, we show a simple, accurate and phenotypic-neutral measure of cell developmental hierarchy - the fraction of accessible clock-like loci. As cells undergo mitosis, the heterogeneity of chromatin accessibility on clock-like loci is reduced, providing a measure of mitotic age. We developed a method, EpiTrace, that counts the fraction of opened clock-like loci from scATAC data to determine cell age and perform lineage tracing. EpiTrace works in various cell lineages and animal species, shows concordance with known developmental hierarchies, correlates well with DNA methylation-based clocks, and is complementary with mutation-based lineage tracing, RNA velocity, and stemness predictions. Applying EpiTrace to scATAC data revealed a multitude of novel biological insights with clinically relevant implications, ranging from hematopoiesis, organ development, tumor biology and immunity to cortical gyrification. Our work discovered a universal epigenomic hallmark during cellular development, which facilitates the study of cellular hierarchies and organismal aging.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.