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Prioritization of cell types responsive to biological perturbations in single-cell data with Augur

Nature Protocols volume 16, pages 3836–3873 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Advances in single-cell genomics now enable large-scale comparisons of cell states across two or more experimental conditions. Numerous statistical tools are available to identify individual genes, proteins or chromatin regions that differ between conditions, but many experiments require inferences at the level of cell types, as opposed to individual analytes. We developed Augur to prioritize the cell types within a complex tissue that are most responsive to an experimental perturbation. In this protocol, we outline the application of Augur to single-cell RNA-seq data, proceeding from a genes-by-cells count matrix to a list of cell types ranked on the basis of their separability following a perturbation. We provide detailed instructions to enable investigators with limited experience in computational biology to perform cell-type prioritization within their own datasets and visualize the results. Moreover, we demonstrate the application of Augur in several more specialized workflows, including the use of RNA velocity for acute perturbations, experimental designs with multiple conditions, differential prioritization between two comparisons, and single-cell transcriptome imaging data. For a dataset containing on the order of 20,000 genes and 20 cell types, this protocol typically takes 1–4 h to complete.

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Fig. 1: Overview of the workflow for cell-type prioritization in single-cell data.
Fig. 2: Augur workflow.
Fig. 3: Basic workflow for cell-type prioritization (case study 1).
Fig. 4: Cell-type prioritization in RNA velocity (case study 2) and on clustering trees.
Fig. 5: Cell-type prioritization across multiple experimental conditions and differential prioritization (case studies 3 and 4).
Fig. 6: Cell-type prioritization in datasets confounded by batch effects.

Data availability

The datasets discussed in this protocol are available from Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4473025). Accession codes for these datasets are provided in Table 2.

Code availability

Augur is a freely available software package written in the R programming language and released under the MIT license. Source code can be obtained from https://github.com/neurorestore/Augur. We provide support through the GitHub issues tracker at https://github.com/neurorestore/Augur/issues.

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Acknowledgements

M.A.S. acknowledges support from Wings for Life, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) (Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement), an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, a UBC Four Year Fellowship, a Vancouver Coastal Health–CIHR–UBC MD/PhD Studentship, a Brain Canada Hubert van Tol fellowship and a BCRegMed Collaborative Research Travel Grant. J.W.S. is supported by a CIHR Banting postdoctoral fellowship and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowship (No. 842578). Work in L.J.F.’s group is supported by Genome Canada/Genome BC (Project 264PRO). The present work was supported by a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC-2015-CoG HOW2WALKAGAIN 682999) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (subside 310030_192558).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Jordan W. Squair, Michael A. Skinnider.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Neuroprosthetics and Brain Mind Institute, Faculty of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Jordan W. Squair, Michael A. Skinnider, Matthieu Gautier & Grégoire Courtine

  2. NeuroRestore, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) and University of Lausanne (UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Jordan W. Squair, Michael A. Skinnider & Grégoire Courtine

  3. International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD), University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Jordan W. Squair

  4. Michael Smith Laboratories, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Michael A. Skinnider & Leonard J. Foster

  5. Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Leonard J. Foster

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Contributions

J.W.S. and M.A.S. implemented all procedures and developed Augur. M.G. contributed to the procedures. L.J.F. and G.C. supervised the work. J.W.S., M.A.S. and G.C. wrote the manuscript. All authors edited the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jordan W. Squair, Michael A. Skinnider or Grégoire Courtine.

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Competing interests

G.C. is a founder and shareholder of ONWARD Medical, a company with no direct relationships with the present work.

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Peer review information Nature Protocols thanks Lyla Atta, Jean Fan, Brendan Miller, Joshua Welch and the other, anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Related links

Key reference using this protocol

Skinnider, M. et al. Nat. Biotechnol. 39, 30–34 (2021): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0605-1

Key data used in this protocol

Kang, H. et al. Nat. Biotechnol. 36, 89–94 (2018): https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4042

Bhattacherjee, A. et al. Nat. Commun. 10, 4169 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12054-3

Moffitt, J. R. et al. Science 362, eaau5324 (2018): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau5324

Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Optimized workflow for differential cell-type prioritization.

Differential cell-type prioritization in the Moffitt et al., 201835 MERFISH dataset with variable numbers of permutations, subsamples per permutation, and total subsamples. a, Differential prioritization in the full dataset, with a background of 1,000 independent permutations. The top five cell types with a permutation P-value < 0.05 are shown throughout. b–e, Impact of reducing the number of permutations on differential prioritization. Differential prioritization yields stable results with the number of permutations decreased to 100, but becomes noisier below this threshold. Moreover, with 100 permutations, over 134 core-hours are required. b, Differential prioritization with 30 permutations (left) or 100 permutations (right). c, Correlations between differential prioritization –log10 P-values for each cell type in the reduced datasets with 30 permutations (left) or 100 permutations (right), compared with the full dataset of 1,000 permutations shown in a. d, Correlation of –log10 P-values to the full dataset for between 2 and 999 permutations. e, Total runtime required to perform between 1 and 1,000 permutations. f,g, Impact of reducing the number of subsamples on differential prioritization. A full 50 subsamples are required in each permuted dataset for accurate differential prioritization. f, Differential prioritization with one, five or ten subsamples per permutation. g, Correlations between differential prioritization –log10 P-values for each cell type in the reduced datasets with one, five or ten subsamples per permutation, compared with the complete dataset shown in a. h, Correlation coefficients to the full dataset with one, five or ten subsamples per permutation. Error bars show 95% confidence interval. i, Distribution of mean AUCs with 1, 5, 10 or 50 subsamples per permutation. The variance of null distribution is inflated with <50 subsamples per permutation, which precludes differential prioritization. j, Distribution of mean AUCs in the complete dataset of 1,000 permutations (‘default’), or an equivalent number of mean AUCs sampled with replacement from a background of 100, 500 or 1,000 total subsamples, with 50 subsamples per permutation. The null distribution using sampling with replacement is indistinguishable from the null distribution in the complete dataset. k–n, Sampling with replacement enables accurate differential prioritization at dramatically reduced computational cost, providing an optimized workflow for differential prioritization. k, Differential prioritization after sampling with replacement from a background of 100, 500 or 1,000 total subsamples. The original results from the complete dataset are approximated with 500 or more subsamples. l, Correlation of –log10 P-values to the full dataset for between 100, 500 and 1,000 total permutations. m, Correlation coefficients to the full dataset with between 50 and 1,000 mean AUCs drawn from a background of 100, 500 or 1,000 subsamples. n, Total runtime required to perform the full permutation analysis versus 100, 500 or 1,000 total permutations using augur_mode = "permute”.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Augur outperforms DE-based methods with subsampling.

Cell-type prioritization in simulated scRNA-seq data74 from a tissue with eight cell types and increasingly unequal numbers of cells per type, as quantified by the Gini coefficient29. The average number of DE genes at 5% false discovery rate in 50 subsamples of 20 cells per condition was tallied using six different statistical tests (t-test, Wilcoxon rank-sum test, likelihood ratio test75, logistic regression76, MAST77 and a negative binomial generalized linear model), implemented through the Seurat ‘FindMarkers’ function. The accuracy of cell-type prioritization was quantified as the Pearson correlation between the cell-type prioritizations (AUC or average number of DE genes, for Augur and single-cell differential expression tests, respectively) and the true proportion of DE genes under the simulation ground truth. The mean of five simulation replicates is shown throughout. Insets show binomial P-values for the sign of the difference in correlations (that is, the frequency with which Augur outperforms single-cell differential expression with subsampling), all with n = 120. a,b, Impact of perturbation intensity (differential expression effect size) on cell-type prioritization for a representative test for single-cell differential gene expression (Wilcoxon rank-sum test). Augur outperforms single-cell differential expression with subsampling in prioritizing cell types in the context of by subtler perturbations. c,d, Impact of sequencing depth (% of reads downsampled) on cell-type prioritization for a representative test for single-cell differential gene expression (Wilcoxon rank-sum test), with the location parameter of the differential expression factor log-normal distribution set to 0.5. Augur outperforms single-cell differential expression with subsampling in more sparsely sequenced datasets. e,f, Impact of perturbation intensity on cell-type prioritization for five additional tests for single-cell differential gene expression. g,h, Impact of sequencing depth on cell-type prioritization for five additional tests for single-cell differential gene expression.

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Squair, J.W., Skinnider, M.A., Gautier, M. et al. Prioritization of cell types responsive to biological perturbations in single-cell data with Augur. Nat Protoc 16, 3836–3873 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41596-021-00561-x

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