Determining cell type abundance and expression from bulk tissues with digital cytometry
- PMID: 31061481
- PMCID: PMC6610714
- DOI: 10.1038/s41587-019-0114-2
Determining cell type abundance and expression from bulk tissues with digital cytometry
Abstract
Single-cell RNA-sequencing has emerged as a powerful technique for characterizing cellular heterogeneity, but it is currently impractical on large sample cohorts and cannot be applied to fixed specimens collected as part of routine clinical care. We previously developed an approach for digital cytometry, called CIBERSORT, that enables estimation of cell type abundances from bulk tissue transcriptomes. We now introduce CIBERSORTx, a machine learning method that extends this framework to infer cell-type-specific gene expression profiles without physical cell isolation. By minimizing platform-specific variation, CIBERSORTx also allows the use of single-cell RNA-sequencing data for large-scale tissue dissection. We evaluated the utility of CIBERSORTx in multiple tumor types, including melanoma, where single-cell reference profiles were used to dissect bulk clinical specimens, revealing cell-type-specific phenotypic states linked to distinct driver mutations and response to immune checkpoint blockade. We anticipate that digital cytometry will augment single-cell profiling efforts, enabling cost-effective, high-throughput tissue characterization without the need for antibodies, disaggregation or viable cells.
Conflict of interest statement
Competing Interests
A.M.N. has patent filings related to expression deconvolution and cancer biomarkers and has served as a consultant for Roche, Merck, and CiberMed. A.A.A. has patent filings related to expression deconvolution and cancer biomarkers and has served as a consultant or advisor for Roche, Genentech, Janssen, CiberMed, Pharmacyclics, Gilead, and Celgene. M.D. has patent filings related to cancer biomarkers and has served as a consultant for Roche, Novartis, CiberMed, and Quanticel Pharmaceuticals. No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed by the other authors.
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Comment in
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Expanded CIBERSORTx.Nat Methods. 2019 Jul;16(7):577. doi: 10.1038/s41592-019-0486-8. Nat Methods. 2019. PMID: 31249418 No abstract available.
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