%0 Journal Article %A Robrecht Cannoodt %A Wouter Saelens %A Dorine Sichien %A Simon Tavernier %A Sophie Janssens %A Martin Guilliams %A Bart Lambrecht %A Katleen De Preter %A Yvan Saeys %T SCORPIUS improves trajectory inference and identifies novel modules in dendritic cell development %D 2016 %R 10.1101/079509 %J bioRxiv %P 079509 %X Recent advances in RNA sequencing enable the generation of genome-wide expression data at the single-cell level, opening up new avenues for transcriptomics and systems biology. A new application of single-cell whole-transcriptomics is the unbiased ordering of cells according to their progression along a dynamic process of interest. We introduce SCORPIUS, a method which can effectively reconstruct an ordering of individual cells without any prior information about the dynamic process. Comprehensive evaluation using ten scRNA-seq datasets shows that SCORPIUS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. We used SCORPIUS to generate novel hypotheses regarding dendritic cell development, which were subsequently validated in vivo. This work enables data-driven investigation and characterization of dynamic processes and lays the foundation for objective benchmarking of future trajectory inference methods. %U https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/10/07/079509.full.pdf