PieParty: Visualizing cells from scRNA-seq data as pie charts

Published: Aug. 26, 2020, 2:01 a.m.

Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.08.25.267021v1?rss=1 Authors: Kurtenbach, S., Dollar, J. J., Durante, M. A., Harbour, J. W. Abstract: Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has been a transformative technology in many research fields. Dimensional reduction techniques such as UMAP and tSNE are used to visualize scRNA-seq data in two or three dimensions in order for cells to be clustered in biologically meaningful ways. Subsequently, gene expression is frequently mapped onto these plots to show the distribution of expression across cell types. However, plotting each cell with only one color leads to repetitive and unintuitive representations. Here, we present Pie Party, which allows scRNA-seq data to be plotted such that every cell is represented as a pie chart, where every slice in the pie charts correspond to the gene expression of individual genes, which allows for the simultaneous visualization of the expression of multiple genes and gene networks. The resulting figures are information dense, space efficient and highly intuitive. PieParty is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/harbourlab/PieParty. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info