Mapping transcriptional responses to cellular perturbation dictionaries with RNA fingerprinting [scRNA-Seq]
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ABSTRACT: Single-cell perturbation dictionaries systematically measure how cells respond to genetic and chemical perturbations, creating the opportunity to assign causal interpretations to observational data. We introduce RNA fingerprinting, a statistical framework that maps transcriptional responses from new experiments onto reference perturbation dictionaries. RNA fingerprinting learns representations of perturbations, or ``fingerprints," from single-cell data, then probabilistically assigns query cells to one or more candidate perturbations. We benchmark our method across ground-truth datasets, demonstrating accurate assignments at single-cell resolution, scalability to genome-wide screens, and the ability to resolve combinatorial perturbations. We demonstrate its broad utility across diverse biological settings: identifying context-specific regulators of p53 under ribosomal stress, characterizing drug mechanisms of action and dose-dependent off-target effects, and uncovering cytokine-driven B cell heterogeneity during secondary influenza infection in vivo. Together, these results establish RNA fingerprinting as a versatile framework for interpreting single-cell datasets by linking cellular states to the underlying perturbations which generated them.
ORGANISM(S): Homo sapiens
PROVIDER: GSE339457 | GEO | 2026/07/27
REPOSITORIES: GEO
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