Skip to the content.

Schedule for the single-cell RNA-seq data analysis workshop

Pre-reading

Day 1

Time Topic Instructor
09:30 - 09:45 Workshop introduction Meeta
09:45 - 11:00 Introduction to Single Cell RNA-sequencing: a practical guide Dr. Arpita Kulkarni
11:00 - 11:05 Break  
11:05 - 11:15 scRNA-seq pre-reading discussion All
11:15 - 11:55 Quality control set-up Noor
11:55 - 12:00 Overview of self-learning materials and homework submission Meeta

Before the next class:

I. Please study the contents and work through all the code within the following lessons:

  1. Quality control
    Click here for a preview of this lesson
    Before you start any analysis, it’s important to know whether or not you have good quality cells. At these early stages you can flag or remove samples that could produce erroneous results downstream.

    In this lesson you will:
    - Compute essential QC metrics for each sample
    - Create plots to visualize metrics per sample
    - Critically evaluate each plot and learn what each QC metric means

  2. Overview of Clustering Workflow
    Click here for a preview of this lesson
    QC is complete, what's next?

    In this lesson you will get a brief overview of the next steps in the scRNA-seq analysis workflow. It's good to have a big picture understanding before we get into the nitty gritty details!

  3. Theory of PCA
    Click here for a preview of this lesson
    Before we can begin the next steps of the workflow, we need to make sure you have a good understanding of Principal Components Analysis (PCA). This method will be utilized in the scRNA-seq analysis workflow, and this foundation will help you better navigate those steps and interpretation of results.

  4. Normalization and regressing out unwanted variation
    Click here for a preview of this lesson
    During the analysis we will be making lots of comparisons; between cells, between samples, or both. To make accurate comparisons of gene expression we need to first perform normalization. We also want to make sure that the differences we find are a true biolgical effect and not a result of other sources of unwanted variation .

    In this lesson you will:
    - Assess your data for any unwanted variation
    - Normalize the data while also regressing out any identified sources of unwanted variation

II. Submit your work:

III. Run the code in this script to perform the steps of integration. We will discuss the code and theory in class.

Questions?


Day 2

Time Topic Instructor
09:30 - 10:40 Self-learning lessons discussion All
10:40 - 10:45 Break  
10:45 - 12:00 Integration Meeta

Before the next class:

I. Please study the contents and work through all the code within the following lessons:

  1. Clustering
    Click here for a preview of this lesson
    From the UMAP visualization of our data we can see that the cells are positioned into groups. Our next task is to isolate clusters of cells that are most similar to one another based on gene expression.

    In this lesson you will:
    - Learn the theory behind clustering and how it is performed in Seurat
    - Cluster cells and visualize them on the UMAP
  2. Clustering quality control
    Click here for a preview of this lesson
    After separating cells into clusters, it is crtical to evaluate whether they are biologically meaningful or not. At this point we can also decide if we need to re-cluster and/or potentialy go back to a previous QC step.

    In this lesson you will:
    - Check to see that clusters are not influenced by uninteresting sources of variation
    - Check to see whether the major principal components are driving the different clusters
    - Explore the cell type identities by looking at the expression for known markers across the clusters.
  3. Marker identification
    Click here for a preview of this lesson
    By this point, you have defined most of your clusters as representative populations of particular cell types. However, there may still some uncertanity and/or unknowns. This step in workflow is about using the gene expression data to identify genes that exhibit a significantly higher (or lower) level of expression for a partcular cluster of cells.

    In this lesson, we idenitfy these lists of genes and use them to:
    - Verify the identity of certain clusters
    - Help surmise the identity of any unknown clusters

II. Submit your work:

Questions?


Day 3

Time Topic Instructor
09:30 - 10:30 Self-learning lessons discussion All
10:30 - 10:40 Workflow summary Noor
10:40 - 10:45 Break  
10:45 - 11:30 Discussion, Final Q & A All
11:30 - 12:00 Wrap up Meeta

Answer Keys

Downstream analyses

Differential expression between conditions


Resources

We have covered the analysis steps in quite a bit of detail for scRNA-seq exploration of cellular heterogeneity using the Seurat package. For more information on topics covered, we encourage you to take a look at the following resources:

Building on this workshop