Integrative analyses of single-cell transcriptome and regulome using MAESTRO

Chenfei Wang, Dongqing Sun, …, Ming Tang, Henry Long, Tao Liu, and X.Shirley Liu

Abstract

We present Model-based AnalysEs of Transcriptome and RegulOme (MAESTRO), a comprehensive open-source computational workflow (http://github.com/liulab-dfci/MAESTRO) for the integrative analyses of single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) and ATAC-seq (scATAC-seq) data from multiple platforms. MAESTRO provides functions for pre-processing, alignment, quality control, expression and chromatin accessibility quantification, clustering, differential analysis, and annotation. By modeling gene regulatory potential from chromatin accessibilities at the single-cell level, MAESTRO outperforms the existing methods for integrating the cell clusters between scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq. Furthermore, MAESTRO supports automatic cell-type annotation using predefined cell type marker genes and identifies driver regulators from differential scRNA-seq genes and scATAC-seq peaks.