STACAS: Sub-Type Anchor Correction for Alignment in Seurat to integrate single-cell RNA-seq data

Abstract

Computational tools for the integration of single-cell transcriptomics data are designed to correct batch effects between technical replicates or different technologies applied to the same population of cells. However, they have inherent limitations when applied to heterogeneous sets of data with moderate overlap in cell states or sub-types. STACAS is a package for the identification of integration anchors in the Seurat environment, optimized for the integration of datasets that share only a subset of cell types. We demonstrate that by i) correcting batch effects while preserving relevant biological variability across datasets, ii) filtering aberrant integration anchors with a quantitative distance measure, and iii) constructing optimal guide trees for integration, STACAS can accurately align scRNA-seq datasets composed of only partially overlapping cell populations. We anticipate that the algorithm will be a useful tool for the construction of comprehensive single-cell atlases by integration of the growing amount of single-cell data becoming available in public repositories. Code availabilityR package: https://github.com/carmonalab/STACAS Docker image: https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/mandrea1/stacas_demo