Pitt Pediatrics congratulates Wei Chen, PhD, for their recent publication in Nature Communications with their research titled “A unified model-based framework for doublet or multiplet detection in single-cell multiomics data”. This publication also featured Zhongli Xu and Jing Liu from the Department of Pediatrics.
Droplet-based single-cell sequencing techniques rely on the fundamental assumption that each droplet encapsulates a single cell, enabling individual cells omics profiling. However, the inevitable issue of multiplets – two or more cells encapsulated with in a single droplet – can lead to spurious cell type annotations and obscure true biological findings. The issues of multiplets is exacerbated in single-cell multiomics settings, where integrating cross-modality information for clustering can inadvertently promote the aggregation of multiplet clusters and increase the risk of erroneous cell type annotations.
The team proposed a compound Poisson model-based framework for multiplet detection in single-cell multiomics data. They conducted trimodal DOGMA-seq experiments and generated 17 benchmarking datasets from two issues, involving a total of 280,123 droplets. With this, they were able to show that their proposed method is an essential tool for integrating cross-modality multiplet signals, effectively eliminating multiplet clusters in single-cell multiomics data.
Their research was also featured in the Biotechnology and Methods section of the Nature Communications journal. For more journal publications and news, follow the department on X and Instagram.