RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Latent periodic process inference from single-cell RNA-seq data JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 625566 DO 10.1101/625566 A1 Shaoheng Liang A1 Fang Wang A1 Jincheng Han A1 Ken Chen YR 2019 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/02/625566.abstract AB Convoluted biological processes underlie the development of multicellular organisms and diseases. Advances in scRNA-seq make it possible to study these processes from cells at various developmental stages. Achieving accurate characterization is challenging, however, particularly for periodic processes, such as cell cycles. To address this, we developed Cyclum, a novel AutoEncoder approach that characterizes circular trajectories in the high-dimensional gene expression space. Cyclum substantially improves the accuracy and robustness of cell-cycle characterization beyond existing approaches. Applying Cyclum to removing cell-cycle effects leads to substantially improved delineations of cell subpopulations, which is useful for establishing various cell atlases and studying tumor heterogeneity. Cyclum is available at https://github.com/KChen-lab/cyclum.