CytoSimplex, Simplex Visualization of Cell Fate Similarity in Single-Cell Data#

A simplex scatter plot is a visualization method where each dot is placed basing on its barycentric coordinates. For example, in a 2-simplex (“2” means “in 2D”, and 2-simplex is basically a triangle, so we also call it a ternary simplex), we denote each of the three vertices as a presentation of a certain terminal cell fate, and we calculate the similarity between each cell to each terminal. By converting the similarity to the three vertices into a triplet of barycentric coordinates in the simplex, we can visualize the similarity of each cell to each terminal cell fate in a 2D plot. We initially proposed this method of simplex cell fate visualization in our study of bone marrow endosteal stem cells 1. We generalized this method to also 1-simplex (a two-ended line) and 3-simplex (a tetrahedron).

This site presents the documentation of the Python package “CytoSimplex”. We developed it basing on tests with transcriptomic data (scRNAseq) and chromatin accessibility data (scATACseq). Meanwhile, RNA velocity can be added as another layer of information, as the arrows shown in the example plot above.

If you use CytoSimplex in your research, please cite our paper:

@article{liu2023CytoSimplex,
   author = {Jialin Liu and Yichen Wang and Chen Li and Yichen Gu and Noriaki Ono and Joshua D. Welch},
   title = {CytoSimplex: Visualizing Single-cell Fates and Transitions on a Simplex},
   year = {2023},
   doi = {10.1101/2023.12.07.570655},
   publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory},
   URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2023/12/08/2023.12.07.570655},
   journal = {bioRxiv}
}

Contents:

1: Matsushita, Y., Liu, J., Chu, A.K.Y. et al. Bone marrow endosteal stem cells dictate active osteogenesis and aggressive tumorigenesis. Nat Commun 14, 2383 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38034-2