School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany.
Computational Health Center, Helmholtz Center Munich, Neuherberg, Germany.
Nat Methods. 2024 Jan;21(1):28-31. doi: 10.1038/s41592-023-02112-6. Epub 2023 Dec 4.
Single-cell ATAC sequencing coverage in regulatory regions is typically binarized as an indicator of open chromatin. Here we show that binarization is an unnecessary step that neither improves goodness of fit, clustering, cell type identification nor batch integration. Fragment counts, but not read counts, should instead be modeled, which preserves quantitative regulatory information. These results have immediate implications for single-cell ATAC sequencing analysis.
单细胞 ATAC 测序在调控区域的覆盖度通常被二值化为开放染色质的指标。在这里,我们表明二值化是一个不必要的步骤,它既不能提高拟合度、聚类、细胞类型识别,也不能进行批次整合。相反,应该对片段计数进行建模,而不是读取计数,这可以保留定量的调控信息。这些结果对单细胞 ATAC 测序分析具有直接的影响。