Elucidating dynamic cell lineages and gene networks in time-course single cell differentiation

Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies provide researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to exploit cell heterogeneity. For example, the sequenced cells belong to various cell lineages, which may have different cell fates in stem and progenitor cells. Those cells may differentiate into various mature cell types in a cell differentiation process. To trace the behavior of cell differentiation, researchers reconstruct cell lineages and predict cell fates by ordering cells chronologically into a trajectory with a pseudo-time. However, in scRNA-seq experiments, there are no cell-to-cell correspondences along with the time to reconstruct the cell lineages, which creates a significant challenge for cell lineage tracing and cell fate prediction. Therefore, methods that can accurately reconstruct the dynamic cell lineages and predict cell fates are highly desirable.

In this article, we develop an innovative machine-learning framework called Cell Smoothing Transformation (CellST) to elucidate the dynamic cell fate paths and construct gene networks in cell differentiation processes. Unlike the existing methods that construct one single bulk cell trajectory, CellST builds cell trajectories and tracks behaviors for each individual cell. Additionally, CellST can predict cell fates even for less frequent cell types. Based on the individual cell fate trajectories, CellST can further construct dynamic gene networks to model gene-gene relationships along the cell differentiation process and discover critical genes that potentially regulate cells into various mature cell types.