PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Fabio Zanini
AU  - Bojk A. Berghuis
AU  - Robert C. Jones
AU  - Benedetta Nicolis di Robilant
AU  - Rachel Yuan Nong
AU  - Jeffrey Norton
AU  - Michael F. Clarke
AU  - Stephen R. Quake
TI  - Northstar enables automatic classification of known and novel cell types from tumor samples
AID  - 10.1101/820928
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 820928
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/25/820928.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/25/820928.full
AB  - Single cell transcriptomics is revolutionising our understanding of tissue and disease heterogeneity, yet cell type identificationl remains a partially manual task. Published algorithms for automatic cell annotation are limited to known cell types and fail to capture novel populations, especially cancer cells. We developed northstar, a computational approach to classify thousands of cells based on published data within seconds while simultaneously identifying and highlighting new cell states such as malignancies. We tested northstar on human glioblastoma and melanoma and obtained high accuracy and robustness. We collected eleven pancreatic tumors and identified three shared and five private neoplastic cell populations, offering insight into the origins of neuroendocrine and exocrine tumors. northstar is a useful tool to assign known and novel cell type and states in the age of cell atlases.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.