Plot gene expression distribution from overall and cell type-specific perspective

This function generates density plots to visualize the distribution of gene expression values for a specific gene across the overall dataset and within a specified cell type.

plotMarkerExpression(
  query_data,
  reference_data,
  ref_cell_type_col,
  query_cell_type_col,
  cell_type,
  gene_name,
  assay_name = "logcounts",
  normalization = c("z_score", "min_max", "rank", "none"),
  max_cells = 2500
)

Arguments

query_data

A SingleCellExperiment object containing numeric expression matrix for the query cells.

reference_data

A SingleCellExperiment object containing numeric expression matrix for the reference cells.

ref_cell_type_col

The column name in the colData of reference_data that identifies the cell types.

query_cell_type_col

The column name in the colData of query_data that identifies the cell types.

cell_type

A vector of cell type cell_types to plot (e.g., c("T-cell", "B-cell")).

gene_name

The gene name for which the distribution is to be visualized.

assay_name

Name of the assay on which to perform computations. Default is "logcounts".

normalization

Method for normalizing expression values. Options: "z_score" (default), "min_max", "rank", "none".

max_cells

Maximum number of cells to retain. If the object has fewer cells, it is returned unchanged. Default is 2500.

Value

A ggplot object containing density plots comparing reference and query distributions.

Details

This function generates density plots to compare the distribution of a specific marker gene between reference and query datasets. The aim is to inspect the alignment of gene expression levels as a surrogate for dataset similarity. Similar distributions suggest a good alignment, while differences may indicate discrepancies or incompatibilities between the datasets.

Multiple normalization options are available: - "z_score": Standard z-score normalization within each dataset - "min_max": Min-max scaling to [0,1] range within each dataset - "rank": Maps values to quantile ranks (0-100 scale) - "none": No transformation (preserves original scale differences)

Author

Anthony Christidis, anthony-alexander_christidis@hms.harvard.edu

Examples

# Load data
data("reference_data")
data("query_data")

# Note: Users can use SingleR or any other method to obtain the cell type annotations.
plotMarkerExpression(reference_data = reference_data,
                     query_data = query_data,
                     ref_cell_type_col = "expert_annotation",
                     query_cell_type_col = c("expert_annotation", "SingleR_annotation")[1],
                     gene_name = "CD8A",
                     cell_type = "CD4",
                     normalization = "z_score")