Abstract
Recent technological developments have enabled the characterization of the epigenetic landscape of single cells across a range of tissues in normal and diseased states and under various biological and chemical perturbations. While analysis of these profiles resembles methods from single-cell transcriptomic studies, unique challenges are associated with bioinformatics processing of single-cell epigenetic data, including a much larger (10–1,000×) feature set and significantly greater sparsity, requiring customized solutions. Here, we discuss the essentials of the computational methodology required for analyzing common single-cell epigenomic measurements for DNA methylation using bisulfite sequencing and open chromatin using ATAC-Seq.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Schep AN, Wu B, Buenrostro JD, Greenleaf WJ (2017) chromVAR: inferring transcription-factor-associated accessibility from single-cell epigenomic data. Nat Methods 14(10):975–978. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4401
Krueger F, Andrews SR (2011) Bismark: a flexible aligner and methylation caller for Bisulfite-Seq applications. Bioinformatics 27(11):1571–1572. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btr167
Langmead B, Salzberg SL (2012) Fast gapped-read alignment with Bowtie 2. Nat Methods 9(4):357–359. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1923
Huber W, Carey VJ, Gentleman R, Anders S, Carlson M, Carvalho BS, Bravo HC, Davis S, Gatto L, Girke T, Gottardo R, Hahne F, Hansen KD, Irizarry RA, Lawrence M, Love MI, MacDonald J, Obenchain V, Oles AK, Pages H, Reyes A, Shannon P, Smyth GK, Tenenbaum D, Waldron L, Morgan M (2015) Orchestrating high-throughput genomic analysis with bioconductor. Nat Methods 12(2):115–121. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3252
Quinlan AR, Hall IM (2010) BEDTools: a flexible suite of utilities for comparing genomic features. Bioinformatics 26(6):841–842. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btq033
Zhang Y, Liu T, Meyer CA, Eeckhoute J, Johnson DS, Bernstein BE, Nusbaum C, Myers RM, Brown M, Li W, Liu XS (2008) Model-based analysis of ChIP-Seq (MACS). Genome Biol 9(9):R137. https://doi.org/10.1186/gb-2008-9-9-r137
Buenrostro JD, Wu B, Litzenburger UM, Ruff D, Gonzales ML, Snyder MP, Chang HY, Greenleaf WJ (2015) Single-cell chromatin accessibility reveals principles of regulatory variation. Nature 523(7561):486–490. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14590
Cusanovich DA, Daza R, Adey A, Pliner HA, Christiansen L, Gunderson KL, Steemers FJ, Trapnell C, Shendure J (2015) Multiplex single cell profiling of chromatin accessibility by combinatorial cellular indexing. Science 348(6237):910–914. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aab1601
Buenrostro JD, Giresi PG, Zaba LC, Chang HY, Greenleaf WJ (2013) Transposition of native chromatin for fast and sensitive epigenomic profiling of open chromatin, DNA-binding proteins and nucleosome position. Nat Methods 10(12):1213–1218. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2688
Lareau CA, Ulirsch JC, Bao EL, Ludwig LS, Guo MH, Benner C, Satpathy AT, Salem R, Hirschhorn JN, Finucane HK, Aryee MJ, Buenrostro JD, Sankaran VG (2018) Interrogation of human hematopoiesis at single-cell and single-variant resolution. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/255224
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Jason Buenrostro for useful feedback in the discussion of the scATAC-seq computational analyses.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Lareau, C., Kangeyan, D., Aryee, M.J. (2019). Preprocessing and Computational Analysis of Single-Cell Epigenomic Datasets. In: Yuan, GC. (eds) Computational Methods for Single-Cell Data Analysis. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1935. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9057-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-9057-3_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-9056-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-9057-3
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols