DEsingle for detecting three types of differential expression in single-cell RNA-seq data.

Abstract

The excessive amount of zeros in single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data includes 'real' zeros due to the on-off nature of gene transcription in single cells and 'dropout' zeros due to technical reasons. Existing differential expression (DE) analysis methods cannot distinguish these two types of zeros. We developed an R package DEsingle which employed Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial model to estimate the proportion of real and dropout zeros and to define and detect three types of DE genes in scRNA-seq data with higher accuracy. The R package DEsingle is freely available at Bioconductor (https://bioconductor.org/packages/DEsingle). Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.