TY - JOUR T1 - SCORPIUS improves trajectory inference and identifies novel modules in dendritic cell development JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/079509 SP - 079509 AU - Robrecht Cannoodt AU - Wouter Saelens AU - Dorine Sichien AU - Simon Tavernier AU - Sophie Janssens AU - Martin Guilliams AU - Bart Lambrecht AU - Katleen De Preter AU - Yvan Saeys Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/07/079509.abstract N2 - Recent advances in RNA sequencing enable the generation of genome-wide expression data at the single-cell level, opening up new avenues for transcriptomics and systems biology. A new application of single-cell whole-transcriptomics is the unbiased ordering of cells according to their progression along a dynamic process of interest. We introduce SCORPIUS, a method which can effectively reconstruct an ordering of individual cells without any prior information about the dynamic process. Comprehensive evaluation using ten scRNA-seq datasets shows that SCORPIUS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. We used SCORPIUS to generate novel hypotheses regarding dendritic cell development, which were subsequently validated in vivo. This work enables data-driven investigation and characterization of dynamic processes and lays the foundation for objective benchmarking of future trajectory inference methods. ER -