Protein & Cell 2020;11(12):866-880

doi:10.1007/s13238-020-00727-5

New avenues for systematically inferring cell-cell communication: through single-cell transcriptomics data.

Xin SHAO 1 ; Xiaoyan LU 1 ; Jie LIAO 1 ; Huajun CHEN 2 ; Xiaohui FAN 3

Affiliations

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Keywords

cell-cell communication; chemical signal-dependent communication; ligand-receptor interaction; network biology; physical contact-dependent communication; single-cell RNA sequencing

Country

China

Language

English

Abstract

For multicellular organisms, cell-cell communication is essential to numerous biological processes. Drawing upon the latest development of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq), high-resolution transcriptomic data have deepened our understanding of cellular phenotype heterogeneity and composition of complex tissues, which enables systematic cell-cell communication studies at a single-cell level. We first summarize a common workflow of cell-cell communication study using scRNA-seq data, which often includes data preparation, construction of communication networks, and result validation. Two common strategies taken to uncover cell-cell communications are reviewed, e.g., physically vicinal structure-based and ligand-receptor interaction-based one. To conclude, challenges and current applications of cell-cell communication studies at a single-cell resolution are discussed in details and future perspectives are proposed.