Molecular mechanisms reconstruction from single-cell multi-omics data with HuMMuS

Abstract

Motivation The molecular identity of a cell results from a complex interplay between heterogeneous molecular layers. Recent advances in single-cell sequencing technologies have opened the possibility to measure such molecular layers of regulation. Results Here, we present HuMMuS, a new method for inferring regulatory mechanisms from single-cell multi-omics data. Differently from the state-of-the-art, HuMMuS captures cooperation between biological macromolecules and can easily include additional layers of molecular regulation. We benchmarked HuMMuS with respect to the state-of-the-art on both paired and unpaired multi-omics datasets. Our results proved the improvements provided by HuMMuS in terms of transcription factor (TF) targets, TF binding motifs and regulatory regions prediction. Finally, once applied to snmC-seq, scATAC-seq and scRNA-seq data from mouse brain cortex, HuMMuS enabled to accurately cluster scRNA profiles and to identify potential driver TFs. Availability and implementation HuMMuS is available at https://github.com/cantinilab/HuMMuS.