Statistical power analysis for single-cell RNA-sequencing

Vieth, Beate (2020): Statistical power analysis for single-cell RNA-sequencing. Dissertation, LMU München: Fakultät für Biologie

Abstract

RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) is an established method to quantify levels of gene expression genome-wide. The recent development of single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) protocols opens up the possibility to systematically characterize cell transcriptomes and their underlying developmental and regulatory mechanisms. Since the first publication on single-cell transcriptomics a decade ago, hundreds of scRNA-seq datasets from a variety of sources have been released, profiling gene expression of sorted cells, tumors, whole dissociated organs and even complete organisms. Currently, it is also the main tool to systematically characterize human cells within the Human Cell Atlas Project. Given its wide applicability and increasing popularity, many experimental protocols and computational analysis approaches exist for scRNA-seq. However, the technology remains experimentally and computationally challenging. Firstly, single cells contain only minute mRNA amounts that need to be reliably captured and amplified for accurate quantification by sequencing. Importantly, the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is commonly used for amplification which might introduce biases and increase technical variation. Secondly, once the sequencing results are obtained, finding the best computational processing pipeline can be a struggle. A number of comparison studies have already been conducted - esp. for bulk RNA-seq - but usually they deal only with one aspect of the workflow. Furthermore, in how far the conclusions and recommendations of these studies can be transferred to scRNA-seq is unknown. Related to the processing of RNA-sequencing, we investigate the effect of PCR amplification on differential expression analysis. We find that computational removal of duplicates has either a negligible or a negative impact on specificity and sensitivity of differential expression analysis, and we therefore recommend not to remove read duplicates by mapping position. In contrast, if duplicates are identified using unique molecular identifiers (UMIs) tagging RNA molecules, both specificity and sensitivity improve. The first integral step of any scRNA-seq experiment is the preparation of sequencing libraries from the cells. We conducted an independent benchmarking study of popular library preparation protocols in terms of detection sensitivity, accuracy and precision using the same mouse embryonic stem cells and exogenous mRNA spike-ins. We recapitulate our previous finding that technical variance is markedly decreased when using UMIs to remove duplicates. In order to assign a monetary value to the detected amounts of technical variance, we developed a simulation framework, that enabled us to compare the power to detect differentially expressed genes across the scRNA-seq library preparation protocols. Our experiences during this comparison study led to the development of the sequencing data processing in zUMIs and the simulation framework and power analysis in powsimR. zUMIs is a pipeline for processing scRNA-seq data with flexible choices regarding UMI and cell barcode design. In addition, we showed with powsimR simulations that the inclusion of intronic reads for gene expression quantification increases the power to detect DE genes and added it as a unique feature to zUMIs. In powsimR, we present our simulation framework extending choices concerning data analysis, enabling researchers to assess experimental design and analysis plans of RNA-seq in terms of statistical power. Lastly, we conducted a systematic evaluation of scRNA-seq experimental and analytical pipelines. We found that choices made concerning normalisation and library preparation protocols have the biggest impact on the validity of scRNA-seq DE analysis. Choosing a good scRNA-seq pipeline can have the same impact on detecting a biological signal as quadrupling the cell sample size. Taken together, we have established and applied a simulation framework that allowed us to benchmark experimental and computational scRNA-seq protocols and hence inform the experimental design and method choices of this important technology.

• Dokumententyp: Dissertationen (Dissertation, LMU München)
• Themengebiete: 500 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik ; 500 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik > 570 Biowissenschaften, Biologie
• Fakultäten: Fakultät für Biologie
• Sprache der Hochschulschrift: Englisch
• Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 20. Januar 2020
• 1. Bericht­erstatter:in: Enard, Wolfgang