scBOL: a universal cell type identification framework for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data

Brief Bioinform. 2024 Mar 27;25(3):bbae188. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbae188.ABSTRACTMOTIVATION: Over the past decade, single-cell transcriptomic technologies have experienced remarkable advancements, enabling the simultaneous profiling of gene expressions across thousands of individual cells. Cell type identification plays an essential role in exploring tissue heterogeneity and characterizing cell state differences. With more and more well-annotated reference data becoming available, massive automatic identification methods have sprung up to simplify the annotation process on unlabeled target data by transferring the cell type knowledge. However, in practice, the target data often include some novel cell types that are not in the reference data. Most existing works usually classify these private cells as one generic 'unassigned' group and learn the features of known and novel cell types in a coupled way. They are susceptible to the potential batch effects and fail to explore the fine-grained semantic knowledge of novel cell types, thus hurting the model's discrimination ability. Additionally, emerging spatial transcriptomic technologies, such as in situ hybridization, sequencing and multiplexed imaging, present a novel challenge to current cell type identification strategies that predominantly neglect spatial organization. Consequently, it is imperative to develop a versatile method that can proficiently annotate single-cell transcriptomics data, encompassing both spatial and non-sp...
Source: Briefings in Bioinformatics - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Source Type: research