PieParty

PieParty visualizes single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data by representing individual cells as pie charts over UMAP or tSNE projections to display multiple selected gene expression levels per cell for comparative analysis and cell-type discrimination.

Key Features:

• Pie Chart Representation: Each cell is depicted as a pie chart with slices corresponding to the expression levels of selected genes.
• Custom gene lists and coloring schemes: Supports mapping user-specified gene lists to pie-chart slices and applying defined color schemes to represent expression values.
• Information density: Encodes multiple gene expression values per cell within a single marker to increase information content on dimensionality reduction plots.
• Integration with dimensionality reduction: Maps per-cell pie charts onto UMAP and tSNE projections to relate multi-gene expression patterns to low-dimensional clustering.
• Biological insight: Facilitates distinguishing cell types and states by visualizing multi-gene expression profiles across cells.

Scientific Applications:

• Genomics: Enables visualization of gene expression heterogeneity across cells in scRNA-seq datasets.
• Developmental biology: Supports analysis of cellular heterogeneity and state transitions during development by displaying per-cell multi-gene signatures.
• Immunology: Assists identification and characterization of immune cell subsets and activation states through multi-gene visualization.
• Cellular heterogeneity analysis: Aids exploration of intra-population variation by presenting simultaneous gene expression patterns at single-cell resolution.
• Gene regulatory network interpretation: Reveals co-expression patterns across cells to support interpretation of gene regulatory relationships.
• Cell type and state identification: Helps identify novel cell types or states by linking multi-gene expression patterns to clusters in UMAP/tSNE space.

Methodology:

Projects high-dimensional scRNA-seq data using UMAP or tSNE into two or three dimensions and represents each cell as a pie chart whose slices indicate the expression levels of selected genes.