In my opinion the cybersort is not really reliable, this is particularly true for those cell types of low abundance:
essentially we want to use a gene, or a set of genes to represent the abundancy of a particular cell type, however, for the result to be reliable, those genes should be:
- Have very high expression in the particular cell type it represents
- No expression in other cell types
missing one of the two the result will be a joke... if you check their signature on reliable datasets, you will figure out it is a joke...
actually, I have been eyeing the whole cybersort and other "signature" methods as a joke as they just help the academics to publish papers based on shitty results without solving any real problem
NB that the authors of CIBERSORT warn against using it on RNAseq (from their webpage):
LM22 was designed and validated on gene expression microarray data, specifically on the following platforms: Affy U133A/Plus2 and Illumina Expression BeadChip (HumanHT-12 v4). Users wishing to apply LM22 to other array platforms (e.g. Agilent single or two-color) or to RNA-Seq data should be forewarned that LM22 has not been validated for these platforms, and the results may not be reliable.
We are in the process of deriving an immune subset signature matrix for RNA-Seq and will inform registered users when it becomes available.
Are you still working on getting LM22 signature?
This is a quote from the CIBERSORT webpage, so I am not generating an RNAseq-based LM22 signature myself, no.