CellChat for systematic analysis of cell–cell communication from single-cell transcriptomics

Abstract

Recent advances in single-cell sequencing technologies offer an opportunity to explore cell–cell communication in tissues systematically and with reduced bias. A key challenge is integrating known molecular interactions and measurements into a framework to identify and analyze complex cell–cell communication networks. Previously, we developed a computational tool, named CellChat, that infers and analyzes cell–cell communication networks from single-cell transcriptomic data within an easily interpretable framework. CellChat quantifies the signaling communication probability between two cell groups using a simplified mass-action-based model, which incorporates the core interaction between ligands and receptors with multisubunit structure along with modulation by cofactors. Importantly, CellChat performs a systematic and comparative analysis of cell–cell communication using a variety of quantitative metrics and machine-learning approaches. CellChat v2 is an updated version that includes additional comparison functionalities, an expanded database of ligand–receptor pairs along with rich functional annotations, and an Interactive CellChat Explorer. Here we provide a step-by-step protocol for using CellChat v2 on single-cell transcriptomic data, including inference and analysis of cell–cell communication from one dataset and identification of altered intercellular communication, signals and cell populations from different datasets across biological conditions. The R implementation of CellChat v2 toolkit and its tutorials together with the graphic outputs are available at https://github.com/jinworks/CellChat. This protocol typically takes ~5 min depending on dataset size and requires a basic understanding of R and single-cell data analysis but no specialized bioinformatics training for its implementation.