Supervised classification enables rapid annotation of cell atlases
Open accessAbstract
Single cell technologies for profiling tissues or even entire organisms are rapidly being adopted. However, the manual process by which cell types are typically annotated in the resulting data is labor-intensive and increasingly rate-limiting for the field. Here we describe Garnett, an algorithm and accompanying software for rapidly annotating cell types in scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq datasets, based on an interpretable, hierarchical markup language of cell type-specific genes. Garnett successfully classifies cell types in tissue and whole organism datasets, as well as across species.
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Tools such as scmap or Garnett can transfer annotations between a reference and a dataset by directly comparing gene expression profiles of annotated reference clusters to individual cells.
“By directly comparing the gene expression profiles of annotated reference clusters to individual cells, tools such as scmap (Kiselev et al, 2018b) or Garnett (preprint: Pliner et al, 2019) can transfer annotations between the reference and the dataset.”
From Current best practices in single-cell RNA-seq analysis: a tutorial (2019) · cites this paper as Pliner et al, 2019
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- Authors
- Pliner, H. A., Shendure, J., & Trapnell, C.
- Affiliations
- University of Washington (US)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- Corresponding author
- Shendure, Jay
- Trapnell, Cole
- Venue
- Nature Methods
- Publisher
- openRxiv
- Published
- 2019-02-04
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 983-986
- ISSN
- 1548-7091 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6791524
- OpenAlex
- W2971398276
- Cited by
- 498
- References
- 27
- Citations by year
- 2026: 45 · 2025: 58 · 2024: 76 · 2023: 73 · 2022: 66 · 2021: 88 · 2020: 73 · 2019: 18 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 21.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by-nd
- Locations
- Nature Methods (publishedVersion)
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1256082)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (RC2 DK114777, R01HL118342, R01HG006283, DP1HG007811, DP2HD088158, U54DK107979)
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group
- National Institutes of Health (DGE-1256082)
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01HL118342, U54HL145611)
- National Human Genome Research Institute (DP1HG007811, R01HG006283, R01HG010632)
- National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (RC2DK114777, U54DK107979)
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (DP2HD088158)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Gene expression and cancer classification
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Biophysics › Cell Image Analysis Techniques
- Keywords
- cell type annotation, supervised classification, single-cell transcriptomics, single-cell chromatin accessibility, cell type-specific genes, marker genes, cell atlases
- MeSH terms
- Algorithms, Animals, Atlases as Topic, Humans, Transcription, Genetic, Sequence Analysis, RNA, Gene Expression Profiling, Single-Cell Analysis, Datasets as Topic
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