{Reference Type}: Evaluation Study {Title}: Identification of cancer subtypes from single-cell RNA-seq data using a consensus clustering method. {Author}: Gan Y;Li N;Zou G;Xin Y;Guan J; {Journal}: BMC Med Genomics {Volume}: 11 {Issue}: 0 {Year}: Dec 2018 31 {Factor}: 3.622 {DOI}: 10.1186/s12920-018-0433-z {Abstract}: BACKGROUND: Human cancers are complex ecosystems composed of cells with distinct molecular signatures. Such intratumoral heterogeneity poses a major challenge to cancer diagnosis and treatment. Recent advancements of single-cell techniques such as scRNA-seq have brought unprecedented insights into cellular heterogeneity. Subsequently, a challenging computational problem is to cluster high dimensional noisy datasets with substantially fewer cells than the number of genes.
METHODS: In this paper, we introduced a consensus clustering framework conCluster, for cancer subtype identification from single-cell RNA-seq data. Using an ensemble strategy, conCluster fuses multiple basic partitions to consensus clusters.
RESULTS: Applied to real cancer scRNA-seq datasets, conCluster can more accurately detect cancer subtypes than the widely used scRNA-seq clustering methods. Further, we conducted co-expression network analysis for the identified melanoma subtypes.
CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis demonstrates that these subtypes exhibit distinct gene co-expression networks and significant gene sets with different functional enrichment.