Author Archives: Ali Zaib

SingleCellTK

The Single Cell Toolkit (SCTK) in the singleCellTK package provides an interface to popular tools for importing, quality control, analysis, and visualization of single cell RNA-seq data. SCTK allows users to seamlessly integrate tools from various packages at different stages of the analysis workflow. A general “a la carte” workflow gives users the ability access ……

Award: Methods and Software for Decontamination of Single-Cell Data

Project Summary Despite their many advantages, single-cell technologies can suffer from the presence of contamination arising from different sources. High levels of contamination can hinder important analyses such as clustering, marker identification, and differential expression. This team has previously developed a tool called decontX that estimates and removes contamination arising from the presence of ambient ……

Celda: a Bayesian model to perform co-clustering of genes into modules and cells into subpopulations using single-cell RNA-seq data

Single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) has emerged as a powerful technique to quantify gene expression in individual cells and to elucidate the molecular and cellular building blocks of complex tissues. We developed a novel Bayesian hierarchical model called Cellular Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Celda) to perform co-clustering of genes into transcriptional modules and cells into subpopulations. Celda can ……

Inactivation of the Hippo tumor suppressor pathway promotes melanoma

Melanoma is commonly driven by activating mutations in the MAP kinase BRAF; however, oncogenic BRAF alone is insufficient to promote melanomagenesis. Instead, its expression induces a transient proliferative burst that ultimately ceases with the development of benign nevi comprised of growth-arrested melanocytes. The tumor suppressive mechanisms that restrain nevus melanocyte proliferation remain poorly understood. Here ……

The Mutational Signature Comprehensive Analysis Toolkit (musicatk) for the Discovery, Prediction, and Exploration of Mutational Signatures

Mutational signatures are patterns of somatic alterations in the genome caused by carcinogenic exposures or aberrant cellular processes. To provide a comprehensive workflow for preprocessing, analysis, and visualization of mutational signatures, we created the Mutational Signature Comprehensive Analysis Toolkit (musicatk) package. musicatk enables users to select different schemas for counting mutation types and to easily ……