Back

Adversarial learning enables unbiased organism-wide cross-species alignment of single-cell RNA data

Cooper, S.; Diaz-Mejia, J. J.; Innes, B.; Williams, E.; Mendonca, D.; Focsa, O.; Nixon, A.; Singh, S.; Schuster, R.; Hinz, B.; Buechler, M.

2024-08-11 genetics
10.1101/2024.08.11.607498 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Todays single-cell RNA (scRNA) datasets remain siloed, due to significant challenges associated with their integration at scale. Moreover, most scRNA analysis tools that operate at scale leverage supervised techniques that are insufficient for cell-type identification and discovery. Here, we demonstrate that the alignment of scRNA data using unsupervised models is accurate at an organism-wide scale and between species. To do this, we show adversarial training of a deep-learning model we term batch-adversarial single-cell variational inference (BA-scVI) can be employed to align standardized benchmark datasets comprising dozens of scRNA studies spanning tissues in humans and mice. In the aligned space, we analyze cell types that span tissues in both species and find prevalent complement expressing macrophages and fibroblasts. We provide access to the tools presented via an online interface for atlas exploration and reference-based drag-and-drop alignment of new data.

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.