Single cell and computational biology
Over the years, the group has developed numerous software packages for analysing high-throughput genomics data, especially those derived via single-cell technologies. Below, we provide links to these packages, the majority of which are available on BioConductor:
Implements miscellaneous functions for interpretation of single-cell RNA-seq data. Methods are provided for assignment of cell cycle phase, detection of highly variable and significantly correlated genes, identification of marker genes, and other common tasks in routine single-cell analysis workflows.
Provides a number of utility functions for handling single-cell (RNA-seq) data from droplet technologies such as 10X Genomics. This includes data loading from count matrices or molecule information files, identification of cells from empty droplets, removal of barcode-swapped pseudo-cells, and downsampling of the count matrix.
Implements a variety of methods for batch correction of single-cell (RNA sequencing) data. This includes methods based on detecting mutually nearest neighbours, as well as several efficient variants of linear regression of the log-expression values. Functions are also provided to perform global rescaling to remove differences in depth between batches, and to perform a principal components analysis that is robust to differences in the numbers of cells across batches.
BASiCS (Bayesian Analysis of Single-Cell Sequencing data) is an integrated Bayesian hierarchical model to perform statistical analyses of single-cell RNA sequencing datasets in the context of supervised experiments (where the groups of cells of interest are known a priori, e.g. experimental conditions or cell types). BASiCS performs built-in data normalisation (global scaling) and technical noise quantification (based on spike-in genes). BASiCS provides an intuitive detection criterion for highly (or lowly) variable genes within a single group of cells. Additionally, BASiCS can compare gene expression patterns between two or more pre-specified groups of cells.
MOFA is a factor analysis model that provides a general framework for the integration of multi-omic data sets in an unsupervised fashion. Intuitively, MOFA can be viewed as a versatile and statistically rigorous generalization of principal component analysis to multi-omics data. Given several data matrices with measurements of multiple -omics data types on the same or on overlapping sets of samples, MOFA infers an interpretable low-dimensional representation in terms of a few latent factors.
Single cell Higher Order Testing (scHOT) is an R package that facilitates testing changes in higher order structure of gene expression along either a developmental trajectory or across space. scHOT is general and modular in nature, can be run in multiple data contexts such as along a continuous trajectory, between discrete groups, and over spatial orientations; as well as accommodate any higher order measurement such as variability or correlation.
Milo is a method for differential abundance analysis on KNN graph from single-cell datasets.
As well as developing software, some of the datasets analysed by the lab can also be visualised using stand-alone web resources that facilitate exploration by those without an extensive background in computational biology. For example,
Finally, we ensure that our work is reproducible, and put code used within papers published by the lab on our GitHub site: https://github.com/MarioniLab. Additionally, links are provided within published papers as appropriate.