Droplet scRNA-seq is not zero-inflated

Abstract

Potential users of single cell RNA-sequencing often encounter a choice between high-throughput droplet based methods and high sensitivity plate based methods. In particular there is a widespread belief that single-cell RNA-sequencing will often fail to generate measurements for particular gene, cell pairs due to molecular inefficiencies, causing data to have an overabundance of zero-values. Investigation of published data of technical controls in droplet based single cell RNA-seq experiments demonstrates the number of zeros in the data is consistent with count statistics, indicating that over-abundances of zero-values in biological data are likely due to biological variation as opposed to technical shortcomings.