Dynast: Inclusive and efficient quantification of metabolically labeled transcripts in single cells

Single cell RNA velocity, defined as the time derivative of gene expression, is a powerful concept that can predict the future transcriptional state of the cell. Traditionally, RNA velocity estimations relied on the distinction between spliced and unspliced mRNA in single cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) da...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Min, Kyung Hoi (Joseph)
Other Authors: Weissman, Jonathan S.
Format: Thesis
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2023
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/147475
Description
Summary:Single cell RNA velocity, defined as the time derivative of gene expression, is a powerful concept that can predict the future transcriptional state of the cell. Traditionally, RNA velocity estimations relied on the distinction between spliced and unspliced mRNA in single cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data, resulting in noisy and biased approximations. Recent advancements in metabolic labeling enabled the direct, unbiased measurement of nascent RNA, yielding significantly improved RNA velocity estimates. However, there is still a lack of a standardized computational framework to process these data. This study introduces Dynast, a pipeline to comprehensively and efficiently quantify metabolically labeled and splicing transcripts from high-throughput metabolic labeling-enabled scRNA-seq.