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scRNA gene expression without control/comparator

Hi everyone,

I recently had a patient with a very rare lymphoma type and was able to perform scRNA-Seq of a fresh lymph node biopsy. Is there a way to check for differential gene expression based on one single sample, as I do not have any further (non-lymphoma) material from this patient to compare with his lymphoma sample?

I am grateful for any input!

Thanks a lot & best wishes

rna-seq

1 answer

Sure, you can compare between clusters. But in terms of "malignant vs non-malignant" type comparisons, that depends on whether you can separate those populations with any confidence. If malignant tissues/cells have known markers, you can try to use those to classify cells/clusters as malignant or non-malignant cells. Immune profiling is useful for this in many lymphomas as well, which is something to keep in mind for future experiments.

Thanks for your reply! Can you by any chance recommend a tool/package for this type of analysis? With DESeq2 I find it rather difficult, as it seems to require two sets of values to compare in order to perform differential analysis (at least that's the error message I receive when I try to run it on a single column of gene expression counts)... Many thanks!

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