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Tempora: cell trajectory inference using time-series single-cell RNA sequencing data

Introduction

Tempora is a novel cell trajectory inference method that orders cells using time information from time-series scRNAseq data. Tempora uses biological pathway information to help identify cell type relationships and can identify important time-dependent pathways to help interpret the inferred trajectory.

Usage

Installation

You can install Tempora using devtools:

if (!require('devtools')) {
  # install devtools
  install.packages("devtools")
}

# install Tempora
devtools::install_github("BaderLab/Tempora")

library(Tempora)

Sample data

The Tempora package was validated using three datasets: an in vitro differentiation of human skeletal muscle myoblasts, in vivo early development of murine cerebral cortex and in vivo embryonic and postnatal development of murine cerebellum. These processed datasets can be accessed on the Bader Lab website at https://www.baderlab.org/Software/Tempora.

The MouseCortex dataset will be used in this vignette as an example.

Downlaod the vignette example data.

Manually download the data from https://www.baderlab.org/Software/Tempora.

Or execute the following code to automatically download it.

if (!require('RCurl')) {
  install.package('RCurl')
} 

data_url = "https://www.baderlab.org/Software/Tempora?action=AttachFile&do=get&target="
data_file = "MouseCortex.RData"
dest_data_file <- file.path(getwd(),data_file )
download.file(
    paste(data_url,data_file,sep=""),
    destfile=dest_data_file
)

Input data

Tempora takes processed scRNAseq data as input, either as a gene expression matrix with separate time and cluster labels for all cells, or a Seurat or SingleCellExperiment object containing gene expression data and a clustering result. Tempora does not implement clustering or batch effect correction as part of its pipeline and assumes that the user has input a well-annotated cluster solution free of batch effect into the method.

#install Seurat package when using the MouseCortex data.
if (!require('Seurat')) {
  install.packages('Seurat')
  library('Seurat')
} 

#Load MouseCortex sample data
load("MouseCortex.RData")

We can the import the Seurat object containing the murine cerebral cortex development data into a Tempora object to start the analysis. Here, as the clusters have been manually annotated prior to running Tempora, a vector of cluster label is given to the function. If you have yet to annotate your clusters but have a list of marker genes for expected cell types in the data, you can input the list of marker genes to this function to run automated cluster labeling with GSVA.

#Import MouseCortex data 
#As this is a Seurat v2 object, set assayType to ""
#See ?Tempora::ImportSeuratObject for additional arguments to import Seurat v3 or SingleCellExperiment obbjects
cortex_tempora <- ImportSeuratObject(MouseCortex, clusters = "res.0.6",
                                     timepoints = "Time_points", 
                                     assayType = "",
                                     cluster_labels = c("Neurons","Young neurons","APs/RPs",
                                                        "IPs","APs/RPs", "Young neurons", "IPs"),
                                     timepoint_order = c("e11", "e13", "e15", "e17"))

From the specified clustering result, Tempora will automatically calculate the temporal score of each cluster, which is based on its composition of cells from each timepoint. This information will be stored in the cluster.metadata slot of the Tempora object.

Calculate clusters’ pathway enrichment profiles

Next, the pathway enrichment profiles of the clusters are calculated using GSVA and stored in the cluster.pathways slot of the Tempora object. The default pathway gene set database Tempora uses is the Bader Lab pathway gene set database without electronic annotation Gene Ontology terms, which can be accessed on the Bader Lab website.

To automatically pull the latest version of the gmt file:

if (!require('RCurl')) {
  install.package('RCurl')
} 
gmt_url = "http://download.baderlab.org/EM_Genesets/current_release/Mouse/symbol/"

#list all the files on the server
filenames = getURL(gmt_url)
tc = textConnection(filenames)
contents = readLines(tc)
close(tc)

#get the gmt that has all the pathways and does not include terms inferred from electronic annotations(IEA)
#start with gmt file that has pathways only
rx = gregexpr("(?<=<a href=\")(.*.GOBP_AllPathways_no_GO_iea.*.)(.gmt)(?=\">)",
  contents, perl = TRUE)

gmt_file = unlist(regmatches(contents, rx))
dest_gmt_file <- file.path(getwd(),gmt_file )
download.file(
    paste(gmt_url,gmt_file,sep=""),
    destfile=dest_gmt_file
)

This function also performs principal component analysis (PCA) on the clusters pathway enrichment profiles to remove redundancy due to overrepresentation of certain pathways in the database. The PCA result is stored in the cluster.pathways.dr slot. Tempora also outputs a scree plot to help users identify the number of principal components (PCs) to be used in downstream trajectory construction.

#Estimate pathway enrichment profiles of clusters
cortex_tempora <- CalculatePWProfiles(cortex_tempora, 
                gmt_path = gmt_file,
                method="gsva", min.sz = 5, max.sz = 200, parallel.sz = 1)

Build and visualize trajectory

We can now build the trajectory based on the clusters’ pathway enrichment profiles. Tempora employs the mutual information (MI) rank and data processing inequality approach implemented in ARACNE to calculate MI between all cluster pairs present in the data as well as remove edges with weak MIs. The trajectory is stored as a dataframe of edge lists in the trajectory slot. Tempora then assigns directions to all edges in the network so that edges point from clusters with low temporal scores to clusters with high temporal scores.

#Build trajectory with 6 PCs 
cortex_tempora <- BuildTrajectory(cortex_tempora, n_pcs = 6, difference_threshold = 0.01)

After building the trajectory, we can visualize it as a network, with the piechart at each node representing the composition of cells collected at different time points in the experiment and the arrow connecting each pair of nodes representing lineage relationship between them.

#Visualize the trajectory
cortex_tempora <- PlotTrajectory(cortex_tempora)

This function will add a slot layouts containing the x and y coordinates of all nodes, determined using the Sugiyama layered graph drawing algorithm.

Identify temporally dependent pathways

Finally, we can use Tempora to investigate time-dependent pathways. Tempora fits a generalized additive model to the data to identify pathways whose expressions change over the temporal axis. The results of this analysis is stored in the varying.pws slot of the Tempora object.

#Fit GAMs on pathway enrichment profile
cortex_tempora <- IdentifyVaryingPWs(cortex_tempora, pval_threshold = 0.05)

#Plot expression trends of significant time-varying pathways
PlotVaryingPWs(cortex_tempora)