Note: The full version of this workflow is available at F1000 under the link: https://f1000research.com/articles/6-748/v1 and at Bioconductor workflows under the link: http://bioconductor.org/help/workflows/cytofWorkflow/
Flow cytometry and the more recently introduced CyTOF (cytometry by time-of-flight mass spectrometry or mass cytometry) are high-throughput technologies that measure protein abundance on the surface or within cells. In flow cytometry, antibodies are labeled with fluorescent dyes and fluorescence intensity is measured using lasers and photodetectors. CyTOF utilizes antibodies tagged with metal isotopes from the lanthanide series, which have favorable chemistry and do not occur in biological systems; abundances per cell are recorded with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer. In either case, fluorescence intensities (flow cytometry) or ion counts (mass cytometry) are assumed to be proportional to the expression level of the antibody-targeted antigens of interest.
Due to the differences in acquisition, further distinct characteristics should be noted. Conventional fluorophore-based flow cytometry is non-destructive and can be used to sort cells for further analysis. However, because of the spectral overlap between fluorophores, compensation of the data needs to be performed (Roederer 2001), which also limits the number of parameters that can be measured simultaneously. Thus, standard flow cytometry experiments measure 6-12 parameters with modern systems measuring up to 20 channels (Mahnke and Roederer 2007), while new developments (e.g. BD FACSymphony) promise to increase this capacity towards 50. Moreover, flow cytometry offers the highest throughput with tens of thousands of cells measured per second at relatively low operating costs per sample.
By using rare metal isotopes in CyTOF, cell autofluorescence can be avoided and spectral overlap is drastically reduced. However, the sensitivity of mass spectrometry results in the measurement of metal impurities and oxide formations, which need to be carefully considered in antibody panel design (e.g. through antibody concentrations and coupling of antibodies to neighboring metals). Leipold et al. recently commented that minimal spillover does not equal no spillover (Leipold 2015). Nonetheless, CyTOF offers a high dimension of parameters measured per cell, with current panels using ~40 parameters and the promise of up to 100. Throughput of CyTOF is lower, at the rate of hundreds of cells per second, and cells are destroyed during ionization.
The ability of flow cytometry and mass cytometry to analyze individual cells at high-throughput scales has resulted in a wide range of biological and medical applications. For example, immunophenotyping assays are used to detect and quantify cell populations of interest, to uncover new cell populations and compare abundance of cell populations between different conditions, for example between patient groups (Unen et al. 2016). Thus, it can be used as a biomarker discovery tool.
Various methodological approaches aim for biomarker discovery (Saeys, Gassen, and Lambrecht 2016). A common strategy, which we will refer to through this workflow as the “classic” approach, is to first identify cell populations of interest by manual gating or automated clustering (Hartmann et al. 2016; Pejoski et al. 2016). Second, using statistical tests, one can determine which of the cell subpopulations or protein markers are associated with a phenotype (e.g. clinical outcome) of interest. Typically, cell subpopulation abundance expressed as cluster cell counts or median marker expression would be used in the statistical model to relate to the sample-level phenotype.
Importantly, there are many alternatives to what we propose below, and several new methods are emerging. For instance, citrus (Bruggner et al. 2014) tackles the differential discovery problem by strong over-clustering of the cells, and by building a hierarchy of clusters from very specific to general ones. Using model selection and regularization techniques, clusters and markers that associate with the outcome are identified. A new machine learning approach, CellCnn (Arvaniti and Claassen 2016), learns the representation of clusters that are associated with the considered phenotype by means of convolutional neural networks, which makes it particularly applicable to detecting discriminating rare cell populations. However, there are tradeoffs to consider. citrus performs feature selection but does not provide significance levels, such as p-values, for the strength of associations. Due to its computational requirements, citrus can not be run on entire mass cytometry datasets and one typically must analyze a subset of the data. The “filters” from CellCnn may identify one or more cell subsets that distinguish experimental groups, while these groups may not necessarily correspond to any of the canonical cell types, since they are learned with a data-driven approach.
A noticeable distinction between the machine-learning approaches and our classical regression approach is how the model is designed. citrus and CellCnn model the patient response as a function of the measured HDCyto values, whereas the classical approach models the HDCyto data itself as the response, thus putting the distributional assumptions on the experimental HDCyto data. This carries the distinct advantage that covariates (e.g. age, gender, batch) can be included, together with finding associations of the phenotype to the predictors of interest (e.g. cell type abundance). Specifically, neither citrus nor CellCnn are able to directly account for complex designs, such as paired experiments or presence of batches.
Within the classical approach, hybrid methods are certainly possible, where discovery of interesting cell populations is done with one algorithm, and quantifications or signal aggregations are modeled in standard regression frameworks. For instance, CellCnn provides p-values from a t-test or Mann-Whitney U-test conducted on the frequencies of previously detected cell populations. The models we propose below are flexible extensions of this strategy.
Step by step, this workflow presents differential discovery analyses assembled from a suite of tools and methods that, in our view, lead to a higher level of flexibility and robust, statistically-supported and interpretable results. Cell population identification is conducted by means of unsupervised clustering using the FlowSOM and ConsensusClusterPlus packages, which together were among the best performing clustering approaches for high-dimensional cytometry data (Weber and Robinson 2016). Notably, FlowSOM scales easily to millions of cells and thus no subsetting of the data is required.
To be able to analyze arbitrary experimental designs (e.g. batch effects, paired experiments, etc.), we show how to conduct the differential analysis of cell population abundances using the generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) and of marker intensities using linear models (LM) and linear mixed models (LMM). Model fitting is performed with lme4 and stats packages, and hypothesis testing with the multcomp package.
We use the ggplot2 package as our graphical engine. Notably, we propose a suite of useful visual representations of HDCyto data characteristics, such as an MDS (multidimensional scaling) plot of aggregated signal for exploring sample similarities. The obtained cell populations are visualized using dimension reduction techniques (e.g. t-SNE via the Rtsne package) and heatmaps (via the pheatmap package) to represent characteristics of the annotated cell populations and identified biomarkers.
The workflow is intentionally not fully automatic. First, we strongly advocate for exploratory data analysis to get an understanding of data characteristics before formal statistical modeling. Second, the workflow involves an optional step where the user can manually merge and annotate clusters (see Cluster merging and annotation section) but in a way that is easily reproducible. The CyTOF data used here (see Data description section) is already preprocessed; i.e. the normalization and de-barcoding, as well as removal of doublets, debris and dead cells, were already performed. To see how such an analysis could be performed, please see the Data preprocessing section.
Notably, this workflow is equally applicable to flow or mass cytometry datasets, for which the preprocessing steps have already been performed. In addition, the workflow is modular and can be adapted as new algorithms or new knowledge about how to best use existing tools comes to light. Alternative clustering algorithms such as the popular PhenoGraph algorithm (Levine et al. 2015) (e.g. via the Rphenograph package), dimensionality reduction techniques, such as diffusion maps (L. Haghverdi, Buettner, and Theis 2015) via the destiny package (Angerer et al. 2016)), and SIMLR (Wang et al. 2017) via the SIMLR package could be inserted to the workflow.
We use a subset of CyTOF data originating from Bodenmiller et al. (Bodenmiller et al. 2012) that was also used in the citrus paper (Bruggner et al. 2014). Specifically, we perform our analysis on samples of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 8 healthy donors, where for each individual, an unstimulated and a stimulated samples (for 30 minutes with B cell receptor/Fc receptor crosslinking, known as BCR/FcR-XL) were collected, resulting in 16 samples in total. For each sample, 14 signaling markers and 10 cell surface markers were measured.
The original data is available from the Cytobank report. The subset used here can be downloaded from the Citrus Cytobank repository (files with _BCR-XL.fcs
or _Reference.fcs
endings) or from our web server (see Data import section).
In both the Bodenmiller et al. and citrus manuscripts, the 10 lineage markers were used to identify cell subpopulations. These were then investigated for differences between reference and stimulated cell subpopulations separately for each of the 14 functional markers. The same strategy is used in this workflow; 10 lineage markers are used for cell clustering and 14 functional markers are tested for differential expression between the reference and BCR/FcR-XL stimulation. Even though differential analysis of cell abundance was not in the scope of the Bodenmiller et al. experiment, we present it here to highlight the generality of the discovery.
Conventional flow cytometers and mass cytometers produce .fcs files that can be manually analyzed using programs such as FlowJo [TriStar] or Cytobank (Kotecha, Krutzik, and Irish 2001), or using the R/Bioconductor packages, such as the flowCore package (Ellis et al. 2017). During this initial analysis step, dead cells are removed, compensation is checked and with simple two dimensional scatter plots (e.g. marker intensity versus time), marker expression patterns are checked. Often, modern experiments are barcoded in order to remove analytical biases due to individual sample variation or acquisition time. Preprocessing steps including normalization using bead standards, de-barcoding and compensation can be completed with the CATALYST package, which provides an implementation of the de-barcoding algorithm described by Zunder et al. (Zunder et al. 2015) and the bead-based normalization from Finck et al. (Finck et al. 2013). Of course, preprocessing steps can occur using custom scripts within R or outside of R (e.g. Normalizer (Finck et al. 2013)).
We recommend as standard practice to keep an independent record of all samples collected, with additional information about the experimental condition, including sample or patient identifiers, processing batch and so on. That is, we recommend having a trail of metadata for each experiment. In our example, the metadata file, PBMC8_metadata.xlsx, can be downloaded from the Robinson Lab server with the download.file
function. For the workflow, the user should place it in the current working directory (getwd()
). Here, we load it into R with the read_excel
function from the readxl package and save it into a variable called md
, but other file types and interfaces to read them in are also possible.
The data frame md
contains the following columns:
file_name
with names of the .fcs files corresponding to the reference (suffix “Reference”) and BCR/FcR-XL stimulation (suffix “BCR-XL”) samples,
sample_id
with shorter unique names for each sample containing information about conditions and patient IDs,
condition
describes whether samples originate from the reference (Ref
) or stimulated (BCRXL
) condition,
patient_id
defines the IDs of patients.
The sample_id
variable is used as row names in metadata and will be used all over the workflow to label the samples. It is important to carefully check whether variables are of the desired type (factor, numeric, character), since input methods may convert columns into different data types. For the statistical modeling, we want to make the condition variable a factor with the reference (Ref
) samples being the reference level, where the order of factor levels can be defined with the levels
parameter of the factor
function. We also specify colors for the different conditions in a variable color_conditions
.
library(readxl)
url <- "http://imlspenticton.uzh.ch/robinson_lab/cytofWorkflow"
metadata_filename <- "PBMC8_metadata.xlsx"
download.file(paste0(url, "/", metadata_filename), destfile = metadata_filename,
mode = "wb")
md <- read_excel(metadata_filename)
## Make sure condition variables are factors with the right levels
md$condition <- factor(md$condition, levels = c("Ref", "BCRXL"))
head(md)
## # A tibble: 6 x 4
## file_name sample_id condition patient_id
## <chr> <chr> <fctr> <chr>
## 1 PBMC8_30min_patient1_BCR-XL.fcs BCRXL1 BCRXL Patient1
## 2 PBMC8_30min_patient1_Reference.fcs Ref1 Ref Patient1
## 3 PBMC8_30min_patient2_BCR-XL.fcs BCRXL2 BCRXL Patient2
## 4 PBMC8_30min_patient2_Reference.fcs Ref2 Ref Patient2
## 5 PBMC8_30min_patient3_BCR-XL.fcs BCRXL3 BCRXL Patient3
## 6 PBMC8_30min_patient3_Reference.fcs Ref3 Ref Patient3
## Define colors for conditions
color_conditions <- c("#6A3D9A", "#FF7F00")
names(color_conditions) <- levels(md$condition)
The .fcs files listed in the metadata can be downloaded manually from the Citrus Cytobank repository or automatically from the Robinson Lab server where they are saved in a compressed archive file, PBMC8_fcs_files.zip.
fcs_filename <- "PBMC8_fcs_files.zip"
download.file(paste0(url, "/", fcs_filename), destfile = fcs_filename,
mode = "wb")
unzip(fcs_filename)
To load the content of the .fcs files into R, we use the flowCore. Using read.flowSet
, we read in all files into a flowSet
object, which is a general container for HDCyto data. Importantly, read.flowSet
and the underlying read.FCS
functions, by default, may transform the marker intensities and remove cells with extreme positive values. We keep these options off to be sure that we control the exact preprocessing steps.
library(flowCore)
fcs_raw <- read.flowSet(md$file_name, transformation = FALSE,
truncate_max_range = FALSE)
fcs_raw
In our example, information about the panel is also available in a file called PBMC8_panel.xlsx, and can be downloaded from the Robinson Lab server and loaded into a variable called panel
. It contains columns for Isotope
and Metal
that define the atomic mass number and the symbol of the chemical element conjugated to the antibody, respectively, and Antigen
, which specifies the protein marker that was targeted; two additional columns specify whether a channel belongs to the lineage or surface type of marker.
The isotope, metal and antigen information that the instrument receives is also stored in the flowFrame
(container for one sample) or flowSet
(container for multiple samples) objects. You can type fcs_raw[[1]]
to see the first flowFrame
, which contains a table with columns name
and desc
. Their content can be accessed with functions pData(parameters())
, which is identical for all the flowFrame
objects in the flowSet
. The variable name
corresponds to the column names in the flowSet
object, you can type in R colnames(fcs_raw)
.
It should be checked that elements from panel
can be matched to their corresponding entries in the flowSet
object to make the analysis less prone to subsetting mistakes. Here, for example, the entries in panel$Antigen
have their exact equivalents in the desc
columns of the flowFrame
objects. In the following analysis, we will often use marker IDs as column names in the tables containing expression values. As a cautionary note, during object conversion from one type to another (e.g. in the creation of data.frame from a matrix), some characters (e.g. dashes) in the dimension names are replaced with dots, which may cause problems in matching. To avoid this problem, we replace all the dashes with underscores. Also, we define two variables that indicate the lineage and functional markers.
panel_filename <- "PBMC8_panel.xlsx"
download.file(paste0(url, "/", panel_filename), destfile = panel_filename,
mode = "wb")
panel <- read_excel(panel_filename)
head(data.frame(panel))
## Metal Isotope Antigen Lineage Functional
## 1 Cd 110:114 CD3 1 0
## 2 In 115 CD45 1 0
## 3 La 139 BC1 0 0
## 4 Pr 141 BC2 0 0
## 5 Nd 142 pNFkB 0 1
## 6 Nd 144 pp38 0 1
# Replace problematic characters
panel$Antigen <- gsub("-", "_", panel$Antigen)
panel_fcs <- pData(parameters(fcs_raw[[1]]))
head(panel_fcs)
## name desc range minRange maxRange
## $P1 Time Time 2377271 0.00000 2377270
## $P2 Cell_length Cell_length 66 0.00000 65
## $P3 CD3(110:114)Dd CD3 1212 -13.66756 1211
## $P4 CD45(In115)Dd CD45 2654 0.00000 2653
## $P5 BC1(La139)Dd BC1 13357 0.00000 13356
## $P6 BC2(Pr141)Dd BC2 39 -66.97583 38
# Replace problematic characters
panel_fcs$desc <- gsub("-", "_", panel_fcs$desc)
# Lineage markers
(lineage_markers <- panel$Antigen[panel$Lineage == 1])
## [1] "CD3" "CD45" "CD4" "CD20" "CD33" "CD123" "CD14"
## [8] "IgM" "HLA_DR" "CD7"
# Functional markers
(functional_markers <- panel$Antigen[panel$Functional == 1])
## [1] "pNFkB" "pp38" "pStat5" "pAkt" "pStat1" "pSHP2" "pZap70"
## [8] "pStat3" "pSlp76" "pBtk" "pPlcg2" "pErk" "pLat" "pS6"
# Spot checks
all(lineage_markers %in% panel_fcs$desc)
## [1] TRUE
all(functional_markers %in% panel_fcs$desc)
## [1] TRUE
Usually, the raw marker intensities read by a cytometer have strongly skewed distributions with varying ranges of expression, thus making it difficult to distinguish between the negative and positive cell populations. It is common practice to transform CyTOF marker intensities using, for example, arcsinh (hyperbolic inverse sine) with cofactor 5 (Bendall et al. 2011 Figure S2; Bruggner et al. 2014) to make the distributions more symmetric and to map them to a comparable range of expression, which is important for clustering. A cofactor of 150 has been promoted for flow cytometry, but users are free to implement alternative transformations, some of which are available from the transform
function of the flowCore package. In the following step, we include only those channels that correspond to the lineage and functional markers. We also rename the columns in the flowSet
to the antigen names from panel$desc
.
## arcsinh transformation and column subsetting
fcs <- fsApply(fcs_raw, function(x, cofactor = 5){
colnames(x) <- panel_fcs$desc
expr <- exprs(x)
expr <- asinh(expr[, c(lineage_markers, functional_markers)] / cofactor)
exprs(x) <- expr
x
})
fcs
## A flowSet with 16 experiments.
##
## column names:
## CD3 CD45 CD4 CD20 CD33 CD123 CD14 IgM HLA_DR CD7 pNFkB pp38 pStat5 pAkt pStat1 pSHP2 pZap70 pStat3 pSlp76 pBtk pPlcg2 pErk pLat pS6
For some of the further analysis, it is more convenient for us to work using a matrix (called expr
) that contains marker expression for cells from all samples. We create such a matrix with the fsApply
function that extracts the expression matrices (function exprs
) from each element of the flowSet
object.
## Extract expression
expr <- fsApply(fcs, exprs)
dim(expr)
## [1] 172791 24
As the ranges of marker intensities can vary substantially, we apply another transformation that scales expression of all markers to values between 0 and 1 using low (e.g. 1%) and high (e.g. 99%) percentiles as the boundary. This additional transformation of the arcsinh-transformed data can sometimes give better representation of relative differences in marker expression between annotated cell populations, however, it is only used here for visualization.
library(matrixStats)
rng <- colQuantiles(expr, probs = c(0.01, 0.99))
expr01 <- t((t(expr) - rng[, 1]) / (rng[, 2] - rng[, 1]))
expr01[expr01 < 0] <- 0
expr01[expr01 > 1] <- 1
We propose some quick checks to verify whether the data we analyze globally represents what we expect; for example, whether samples that are replicates of one condition are more similar and are distinct from samples from another condition. Another important check is to verify that marker expression distributions do not have any abnormalities such as having different ranges or distinct distributions for a subset of the samples. This could highlight problems with the sample collection or HDCyto acquisition, or batch effects that were unexpected. Depending on the situation, one can then consider removing problematic markers or samples from further analysis; in the case of batch effects, a covariate column could be added to the metadata table and used below in the statistical analyses.
The step below generates a plot with per-sample marker expression distributions, colored by condition (see Figure 1). Here, we can already see distinguishing markers, such as pNFkB and CD20, between stimulated and unstimulated conditions.
## Generate sample IDs corresponding to each cell in the `expr` matrix
sample_ids <- rep(md$sample_id, fsApply(fcs_raw, nrow))
library(ggplot2)
library(reshape2)
ggdf <- data.frame(sample_id = sample_ids, expr)
ggdf <- melt(ggdf, id.var = "sample_id",
value.name = "expression", variable.name = "antigen")
mm <- match(ggdf$sample_id, md$sample_id)
ggdf$condition <- md$condition[mm]
ggplot(ggdf, aes(x = expression, color = condition,
group = sample_id)) +
geom_density() +
facet_wrap(~ antigen, nrow = 4, scales = "free") +
theme_bw() +
theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1),
strip.text = element_text(size = 7), axis.text = element_text(size = 5)) +
guides(color = guide_legend(ncol = 1)) +
scale_color_manual(values = color_conditions)
In transcriptomics applications, one of the most utilized exploratory plots is the multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) plot or a principal component analysis (PCA) plot. Such plots show similarities between samples measured in an unsupervised way and give a sense of how much differential expression can be detected before conducting any formal tests. An MDS plot can be generated with the plotMDS
function from the limma package. In transcriptomics, distances between samples are calculated based on the expression of the top varying genes. We propose a similar plot for HDCyto data using median marker expression over all cells to calculate dissimilarities between samples (other aggregations are also possible, and one could reduce the number of top varying markers to include in the calculation). Ideally, samples should cluster well within the same condition, although this depends on the magnitude of the difference between experimental conditions. With this diagnostic, one can identify the outlier samples and eliminate them if the circumstances warrant it.
In our MDS plot on median marker expression values (see Figure 2), we can see that the first dimension (MDS1) separates the unstimulated and stimulated samples reasonably well. The second dimension (MDS2) represents, to some degree, differences between patients. Most of the samples that originate from the same patient are placed at a similar point along the y-axis, for example, samples from patients 7, 5, and 8 are at the top of the plot, samples from patient 4 are located at the bottom of the plot. This also indicates that the marker expression of individual patients is driving similarity and perhaps should be formally accounted for in the downstream statistical modeling.
# Get the median marker expression per sample
library(dplyr)
expr_median_sample_tbl <- data.frame(sample_id = sample_ids, expr) %>%
group_by(sample_id) %>%
summarize_all(funs(median))
expr_median_sample <- t(expr_median_sample_tbl[, -1])
colnames(expr_median_sample) <- expr_median_sample_tbl$sample_id
library(limma)
mds <- plotMDS(expr_median_sample, plot = FALSE)
library(ggrepel)
ggdf <- data.frame(MDS1 = mds$x, MDS2 = mds$y,
sample_id = colnames(expr_median_sample))
mm <- match(ggdf$sample_id, md$sample_id)
ggdf$condition <- md$condition[mm]
ggplot(ggdf, aes(x = MDS1, y = MDS2, color = condition)) +
geom_point(size = 2, alpha = 0.8) +
geom_label_repel(aes(label = sample_id)) +
theme_bw() +
scale_color_manual(values = color_conditions)
Cell population identification typically has been carried out by manual gating, a method based on visual inspection of a series of two-dimensional scatterplots. At each step, a subset of cells, either positive or negative for the two visualized markers, is selected and further stratified in the subsequent iterations until populations of interest across a range of marker combinations are captured. However, manual gating has drawbacks, such as subjectivity, bias toward well-known cell types, and inefficiency when analyzing large datasets, which also contribute to a lack of reproducibility (Saeys, Gassen, and Lambrecht 2016).
Considerable effort has been made to improve and automate cell population identification, such as unsupervised clustering (Aghaeepour et al. 2013). However, not all methods scale well in terms of performance and speed from the lower dimensionality flow cytometry data to the higher dimensionality mass cytometry data (Weber and Robinson 2016), since clustering in higher dimensions can suffer the “curse of dimensionality”.
Beside the mathematical and algorithmic challenges of clustering, cell population identification may be difficult due to the chemical and biological aspects of the cytometry experiment itself. Therefore, caution should be taken when designing panels aimed at detecting rare cell populations by assigning higher sensitivity metals to rare markers. The right choice of a marker panel used for clustering can also be important. It should include all markers that are relevant for cell type identification.
In this workflow, we conduct cell clustering with FlowSOM (Van Gassen et al. 2015) and ConsensusClusterPlus (Wilkerson and Hayes 2010), which appeared amongst the fastest and best performing clustering approaches in a recent study of HDCyto datasets (Weber and Robinson 2016). This ensemble showed strong performance in detecting both high and low frequency cell populations and is one of the fastest methods to run, which enables its interactive usage. We use a slight modification of the original workflow presented in the FlowSOM vignette, which we find more flexible. In particular, we directly call the ConsensusClusterPlus
function that is embedded in metaClustering_consensus
. Thus, we are able to access all the functionality of the ConsensusClusterPlus package to identify the number of clusters.
The FlowSOM workflow consists of three main steps. First, a self-organizing map (SOM) is built using the BuildSOM
function, where cells are assigned according to their similarities to 100 (by default) grid points (or, so-called codebook vectors or codes) of the SOM. The building of a minimal spanning tree, which is mainly used for graphical representation of the clusters, is skipped in this pipeline. And finally, metaclustering of the SOM codes, is performed directly with the ConsensusClusterPlus
function. Additionally, we add an optional round of manual expert-based merging of the metaclusters and allow this to be done in a reproducible fashion.
FlowSOM output can be sensitive to random starts (Weber and Robinson 2016). To make results reproducible, one must specify the seed for the random number generation in R using function set.seed
. It is also advisable to rerun analyses with multiple random seeds, for two reasons. First, one can see how robust the detected clusters are, and second, when the goal is to find smaller cell populations, it may happen that, in some runs, random starting points do not represent rare cell populations, as the chance of selecting starting cells from them is low and they are merged into a larger cluster.
It is important to point out that we cluster all cells from all samples together. This strategy is beneficial, since we label cell populations only once and the mapping of cell types between samples is automatically consistent. In our analysis, cell populations are identified using only the 10 lineage markers as defined in the BuildSOM
function with the colsToUse
argument.
library(FlowSOM)
fsom <- ReadInput(fcs, transform = FALSE, scale = FALSE)
set.seed(1234)
som <- BuildSOM(fsom, colsToUse = lineage_markers)
Automatic approaches for selecting the number of clusters in HDCyto data do not always succeed (Weber and Robinson 2016). In general, we therefore recommend some level of over-clustering, and if desired, manual merging of clusters. Such a hierarchical approach is especially suited when the goal is to detect smaller cell populations.
The SPADE analysis performed by Bodenmiller et al. (Bodenmiller et al. 2012) identified 6 main cell types (T-cells, monocytes, dendritic cells, B-cells, NK cells and surface- cells) that were further stratified into 14 more specific subpopulations (CD4+ T-cells, CD8+ T-cells, CD14+ HLA-DR high monocytes, CD14+ HLA-DR med monocytes, CD14+ HLA-DR low monocytes, CD14- HLA-DR high monocytes, CD14- HLA-DR med monocytes, CD14- HLA-DR low monocytes, dendritic cells, IgM+ B-cells, IgM- B-cells, NK cells, surface- CD14+ cells and surface- CD14- cells). In our analysis, we are interested in identifying the 6 main PBMC populations, including: CD4+ T-cells, CD8+ T-cells, monocytes, dendritic cells, NK cells and B-cells. Following the concept of over-clustering we perform the metaclustering of the (by default) 100 SOM codes into more than expected number of groups. For example, stratification into 20 groups should give enough resolution. We can explore the clustering in a wide variety of visualizations: t-SNE plots, heatmaps and a plot generated by ConsensusClusterPlus
called “delta area”.
We call ConsensusClusterPlus
with maximum number of clusters maxK = 20
and other clustering parameters set to the values as in the metaClustering_consensus
function. Again, to ensure that the analyses are reproducible, we define the random seed.
## Metaclustering into 20 clusters with ConsensusClusterPlus
library(ConsensusClusterPlus)
codes <- som$map$codes
plot_outdir <- "consensus_plots"
nmc <- 20
mc <- ConsensusClusterPlus(t(codes), maxK = nmc, reps = 100,
pItem = 0.9, pFeature = 1, title = plot_outdir, plot = "png",
clusterAlg = "hc", innerLinkage = "average", finalLinkage = "average",
distance = "euclidean", seed = 1234)
## Get cluster ids for each cell
code_clustering1 <- mc[[nmc]]$consensusClass
cell_clustering1 <- code_clustering1[som$map$mapping[,1]]
We can then investigate characteristics of identified clusters with heatmaps that illustrate median marker expression in each cluster (see Figure 3). As the range of marker expression can vary substantially from marker to marker, we use the 0-1 transformed data for some visualizations. However, to stay consistent with FlowSOM and ConsensusClusterPlus, we use the (arcsinh-transformed) unscaled data to generate the dendrogram of the hierarchical structure of metaclusters.
Since we will use the heatmap plots again later on in this workflow, in code chunks below, we create a wrapper function that generates these plots.
color_clusters <- c("#DC050C", "#FB8072", "#1965B0", "#7BAFDE", "#882E72",
"#B17BA6", "#FF7F00", "#FDB462", "#E7298A", "#E78AC3",
"#33A02C", "#B2DF8A", "#55A1B1", "#8DD3C7", "#A6761D",
"#E6AB02", "#7570B3", "#BEAED4", "#666666", "#999999",
"#aa8282", "#d4b7b7", "#8600bf", "#ba5ce3", "#808000",
"#aeae5c", "#1e90ff", "#00bfff", "#56ff0d", "#ffff00")
plot_clustering_heatmap_wrapper <- function(expr, expr01,
cell_clustering, color_clusters, cluster_merging = NULL){
# Calculate the median expression
expr_median <- data.frame(expr, cell_clustering = cell_clustering) %>%
group_by(cell_clustering) %>%
summarize_all(funs(median))
expr01_median <- data.frame(expr01, cell_clustering = cell_clustering) %>%
group_by(cell_clustering) %>%
summarize_all(funs(median))
# Calculate cluster frequencies
clustering_table <- as.numeric(table(cell_clustering))
# This clustering is based on the markers that were used for the main clustering
d <- dist(expr_median[, colnames(expr)], method = "euclidean")
cluster_rows <- hclust(d, method = "average")
expr_heat <- as.matrix(expr01_median[, colnames(expr01)])
rownames(expr_heat) <- expr01_median$cell_clustering
labels_row <- paste0(rownames(expr_heat), " (",
round(clustering_table / sum(clustering_table) * 100, 2), "%)")
labels_col <- colnames(expr_heat)
# Row annotation for the heatmap
annotation_row <- data.frame(cluster = factor(expr01_median$cell_clustering))
rownames(annotation_row) <- rownames(expr_heat)
color_clusters <- color_clusters[1:nlevels(annotation_row$cluster)]
names(color_clusters) <- levels(annotation_row$cluster)
annotation_colors <- list(cluster = color_clusters)
annotation_legend <- FALSE
if(!is.null(cluster_merging)){
cluster_merging$new_cluster <- factor(cluster_merging$new_cluster)
annotation_row$cluster_merging <- cluster_merging$new_cluster
color_clusters <- color_clusters[1:nlevels(cluster_merging$new_cluster)]
names(color_clusters) <- levels(cluster_merging$new_cluster)
annotation_colors$cluster_merging <- color_clusters
annotation_legend <- TRUE
}
# Colors for the heatmap
color <- colorRampPalette(rev(brewer.pal(n = 9, name = "RdYlBu")))(100)
pheatmap(expr_heat, color = color,
cluster_cols = FALSE, cluster_rows = cluster_rows,
labels_col = labels_col, labels_row = labels_row,
display_numbers = TRUE, number_color = "black",
fontsize = 8, fontsize_number = 4,
annotation_row = annotation_row, annotation_colors = annotation_colors,
annotation_legend = annotation_legend)
}
plot_clustering_heatmap_wrapper(expr = expr[, lineage_markers],
expr01 = expr01[, lineage_markers],
cell_clustering = cell_clustering1, color_clusters = color_clusters)
One of the most popular plots for representing single cell data are t-SNE plots, where each cell is represented in a lower, usually two-dimensional, space computed using t-stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) (Van Der Maaten and Hinton 2008). More generally, dimensionality reduction techniques represent the similarity of points in 2 or 3 dimensions, such that similar objects in high dimensional space are also similar in lower dimensional space. Mathematically, there are a myriad of ways to define this similarity. For example, principal components analysis (PCA) uses linear combinations of the original features to find orthogonal dimensions that show the highest levels of variability; the top 2 or 3 principal components can then be visualized.
Nevertheless, there are few notes of caution when using t-SNE or any other dimensionality reduction technique. Since they are based on preserving similarities between cells, those that are similar in the original space will be close in the 2D/3D representation, but the opposite does not always hold. In our experience, t-SNE with default parameters for HDCyto data is often suitable; for more guidance on the specifics of t-SNE, see How to Use t-SNE Effectively (Wattenberg, Viégas, and Johnson 2016). Due to the stochastic nature of t-SNE optimization, rerunning the method will result in different lower dimensional projections, thus it is advisable to run it a few times to identify the common trends and get a feeling about the variability of the results. As with other methods, to be sure that the analysis is reproducible, the user can define the random seed.
t-SNE is a method that requires significant computational time to process the data even for tens of thousands of cells. CyTOF datasets are usually much larger and thus to keep running times reasonable, one may use a subset of cells; for example, here we use 1000 cells from each sample. The t-SNE map below is colored according to the expression level of the CD4 marker, highlighting that the CD4+ T-cells are placed to the left side of the plot (see Figure 4). In this way, one can use a collection of markers to highlight where cell types of interest are located on the map.
Instead of t-SNE, one could also use other dimension reduction techniques, such as PCA, diffusion maps, SIMLR (Wang et al. 2017) or isomaps, some of which are conveniently available via the cytof_dimReduction
function from the cytofkit package (H. Chen et al. 2016). To speed up the t-SNE analysis, one could use a multicore version that is available via the Rtsne.multicore package. Alternative algorithms, such as largeVis
(Tang et al. 2016) (available via the largeVis package), can be used for dimensionality reduction of very large datasets without downsampling.
## Find and skip duplicates
dups <- which(!duplicated(expr[, lineage_markers]))
## Data subsampling: create indices by sample
inds <- split(1:length(sample_ids), sample_ids)
## How many cells to downsample per-sample
tsne_ncells <- pmin(table(sample_ids), 1000)
## Get subsampled indices
set.seed(1234)
tsne_inds <- lapply(names(inds), function(i){
s <- sample(inds[[i]], tsne_ncells[i], replace = FALSE)
intersect(s, dups)
})
tsne_inds <- unlist(tsne_inds)
tsne_expr <- expr[tsne_inds, lineage_markers]
## Run t-SNE
library(Rtsne)
set.seed(1234)
tsne_out <- Rtsne(tsne_expr, check_duplicates = FALSE, pca = FALSE)
## Plot t-SNE colored by CD4 expression
dr <- data.frame(tSNE1 = tsne_out$Y[, 1], tSNE2 = tsne_out$Y[, 2],
expr[tsne_inds, lineage_markers])
ggplot(dr, aes(x = tSNE1, y = tSNE2, color = CD4)) +
geom_point(size = 0.8) +
theme_bw() +
scale_color_gradientn("CD4",
colours = colorRampPalette(rev(brewer.pal(n = 11, name = "Spectral")))(50))
We can color the cells by cluster. Ideally, cells of the same color should be close to each other (see Figure 5).
dr$sample_id <- sample_ids[tsne_inds]
mm <- match(dr$sample_id, md$sample_id)
dr$condition <- md$condition[mm]
dr$cell_clustering1 <- factor(cell_clustering1[tsne_inds], levels = 1:nmc)
## Plot t-SNE colored by clusters
ggplot(dr, aes(x = tSNE1, y = tSNE2, color = cell_clustering1)) +
geom_point(size = 0.8) +
theme_bw() +
scale_color_manual(values = color_clusters) +
guides(color = guide_legend(override.aes = list(size = 4), ncol = 2))
In our experience, manual merging of clusters leads to slightly different results compared to an algorithm with a specified number of clusters. In order to detect somewhat rare populations, some level of over-clustering is necessary so that the more subtle populations become separated from the main populations. In addition, merging can always follow an over-clustering step, but splitting of existing clusters is not generally feasible.
In our setup, over-clustering is also useful when the interest is identifying the “natural” number of clusters present in the data. In addition to the t-SNE plots, one could investigate the delta area plot from the ConsensusClusterPlus package and the hierarchical clustering dendrogram of the over-clustered subpopulations, as shown below.
In our example, we expect around 6 specific cell types, and we have performed FlowSOM clustering into 20 groups as a reasonable over-estimate. After analyzing the heatmaps and t-SNE plots, we can clearly see that stratification of the data into 20 clusters may be too strong. Many clusters are placed very close to each other, indicating that they could be merged together. The same can be deduced from the heatmaps, highlighting that marker expression patterns for some neighboring clusters are very similar. Cluster merging and annotating is somewhat manual, based partially on visual inspection of t-SNE plots and heatmaps and thus, benefits from expert knowledge of the cell types.
In our experience, the main reference for manual merging of clusters is the heatmap of marker characteristics across metaclusters, with dendrograms showing the hierarchy of similarities. Such plots aggregate information over many cells and thus show average marker expression for each cluster. Together with dimensionality reduction, these plots give good insight into the relationships between clusters and the marker levels within each cluster. Given expert knowledge of the cell types and markers, it is then left to the researcher to decide how exactly to merge clusters (e.g., with higher weight given to some markers).
The dendrogram highlights the similarity between the metaclusters and can be used explicitly for the merging. However, there are reasons why we would not always follow the dendrogram exactly. In general, when it comes to clustering, blindly following the hierarchy of codes will lead to identification of populations of similar cells, but it does not necessarily mean that they are of biological interest. The distances between metaclusters are calculated across all the markers, and it may be that some markers carry higher weight for certain cell types. In addition, different linkage methods may lead to different hierarchy, especially when clusters are not fully distinct. Another aspect to consider in cluster merging is the cluster size, represented in the parentheses next to the cluster label in our plots. If the cluster size is very small, but the cluster seems relevant and distinct, one can keep it as separate. However, if it is small and different from the neighboring clustering only in a somewhat unimportant marker, it could be merged. And, if some of the metaclusters do not represent any specific cell types, they could be dropped out of the downstream analysis instead of being merged. However, in case an automated solution for cluster merging is truly needed, one could use the cutree()
function applied to the dendrogram.
Based on the seed that was set, cluster merging of the 20 metaclusters is defined in the PBMC8_cluster_merging1.xlsx file on the Robinson Lab server with the IDs of the original clusters and new cluster names, and we save it as a cluster_merging1
data frame. The expert has annotated 8 cell populations: CD8 T-cells, CD4 T-cells, B-cells IgM-, B-cells IgM+, NK cells, dendritic cells (DCs), monocytes and surface negative cells; monocytes could be further subdivided based on HLA-DR into high, medium and low subtypes.
cluster_merging1_filename <- "PBMC8_cluster_merging1.xlsx"
download.file(paste0(url, "/", cluster_merging1_filename),
destfile = cluster_merging1_filename, mode = "wb")
cluster_merging1 <- read_excel(cluster_merging1_filename)
data.frame(cluster_merging1)
## original_cluster new_cluster
## 1 1 B-cells IgM+
## 2 2 surface-
## 3 3 NK cells
## 4 4 CD8 T-cells
## 5 5 B-cells IgM-
## 6 6 monocytes
## 7 7 monocytes
## 8 8 CD8 T-cells
## 9 9 CD8 T-cells
## 10 10 monocytes
## 11 11 monocytes
## 12 12 CD4 T-cells
## 13 13 DC
## 14 14 CD8 T-cells
## 15 15 CD4 T-cells
## 16 16 DC
## 17 17 CD4 T-cells
## 18 18 CD4 T-cells
## 19 19 CD4 T-cells
## 20 20 CD4 T-cells
## New clustering1m
mm <- match(cell_clustering1, cluster_merging1$original_cluster)
cell_clustering1m <- cluster_merging1$new_cluster[mm]
mm <- match(code_clustering1, cluster_merging1$original_cluster)
code_clustering1m <- cluster_merging1$new_cluster[mm]
We update the t-SNE plot with the new annotated cell populations, Figure 6.
dr$cell_clustering1m <- factor(cell_clustering1m[tsne_inds])
gg_tsne_cl1m <- ggplot(dr, aes(x = tSNE1, y = tSNE2, color = cell_clustering1m)) +
geom_point(size = 0.8) +
theme_bw() +
scale_color_manual(values = color_clusters) +
guides(color = guide_legend(override.aes = list(size = 4)))
gg_tsne_cl1m