Trajectory Algorithms To Infer Stem Cell Fate Decisions

Single-cell trajectory analysis is an active research area in single-cell genomics aiming at developing sophisticated algorithms to reconstruct complex cell-state transition trajectories. Here, we present a step-by-step protocol to use CellRouter, a multifaceted single-cell analysis platform that integrates subpopulation identification, gene regulatory networks, and trajectory inference to precisely and flexibly reconstruct complex single-cell trajectories. Subpopulations are either user-defined or identified by a graph-clustering approach in which a k-nearest neighbor graph (kNN) is created from cell-to-cell distances in a low-dimensional embedding. Edges in this graph are weighted by network similarity metrics (e.g., Jaccard index) to robustly encode phenotypic relatedness, creating a representation of single-cell transcriptomes suitable for community detection algorithms to identify clusters of densely connected cells. This subpopulation structure represents a map of putative cell-state transitions. CellRouter implements a flow network algorithm to explore this map and reconstruct cell-state transitions in complex single-cell, multidimensional omics datasets. We describe a step-by-step application of CellRouter to hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell differentiation toward four major lineages-erythrocytes, megakaryocytes, monocytes, and granulocytes-to demonstrate key components of CellRouter for single-cell trajectory analysis.