EmptyDropsMultiome discriminates real cells from background in single-cell multiomics assays

Abstract Multiomic droplet-based technologies allow different molecular modalities, such as chromatin accessibility and gene expression (scATAC-seq and scRNA-seq), to be probed in the same nucleus. We develop EmptyDropsMultiome, an approach that distinguishes true nuclei-containing droplets from bac...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Stathis Megas, Valentina Lorenzi, John C. Marioni
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMC 2024-05-01
Series:Genome Biology
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-024-03259-x
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Summary:Abstract Multiomic droplet-based technologies allow different molecular modalities, such as chromatin accessibility and gene expression (scATAC-seq and scRNA-seq), to be probed in the same nucleus. We develop EmptyDropsMultiome, an approach that distinguishes true nuclei-containing droplets from background. Using simulations, we show that EmptyDropsMultiome has higher statistical power and accuracy than existing approaches, including CellRanger-arc and EmptyDrops. On real datasets, we observe that CellRanger-arc misses more than half of the nuclei identified by EmptyDropsMultiome and, moreover, is biased against certain cell types, some of which have a retrieval rate lower than 20%.
ISSN:1474-760X