Dimension reduction, cell clustering, and cell-cell communication inference for single-cell transcriptomics with DcjComm

Genome Biol. 2024 Sep 9;25(1):241. doi: 10.1186/s13059-024-03385-6.

Abstract

Advances in single-cell transcriptomics provide an unprecedented opportunity to explore complex biological processes. However, computational methods for analyzing single-cell transcriptomics still have room for improvement especially in dimension reduction, cell clustering, and cell-cell communication inference. Herein, we propose a versatile method, named DcjComm, for comprehensive analysis of single-cell transcriptomics. DcjComm detects functional modules to explore expression patterns and performs dimension reduction and clustering to discover cellular identities by the non-negative matrix factorization-based joint learning model. DcjComm then infers cell-cell communication by integrating ligand-receptor pairs, transcription factors, and target genes. DcjComm demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Keywords: Cell clustering; Cell–cell communication; Joint learning; Non-negative matrix factorization; Single-cell.

MeSH terms

  • Cell Communication*
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Computational Biology / methods
  • Gene Expression Profiling / methods
  • Humans
  • Single-Cell Analysis* / methods
  • Transcriptome*