Identifying Cell Subpopulations and Their Genetic Drivers from Single-Cell RNA-Seq Data Using a Biclustering Approach.

Single-cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-Seq) has attracted much attention recently because it allows unprecedented resolution into cellular activity; the technology, therefore, has been widely applied in studying cell heterogeneity such as the heterogeneity among embryonic cells at varied developmental stages or cells of different cancer types or subtypes. A pertinent question in such analyses is to identify cell subpopulations as well as their associated genetic drivers. Consequently, a multitude of approaches have been developed for clustering or biclustering analysis of scRNA-Seq data.

SIDEseq: A Cell Similarity Measure Defined by Shared Identified Differentially Expressed Genes for Single-Cell RNA sequencing Data.

One goal of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA seq) is to expose possible heterogeneity within cell populations due to meaningful, biological variation. Examining cell-to-cell heterogeneity, and further, identifying subpopulations of cells based on scRNA seq data has been of common interest in life science research. A key component to successfully identifying cell subpopulations (or clustering cells) is the (dis)similarity measure used to group the cells.