PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Jinghua Gu AU - Qiumei Gu AU - Xuan Wang AU - Pingjian Yu AU - Wei Lin TI - Sphinx: modeling transcriptional heterogeneity in single-cell RNA-Seq AID - 10.1101/027870 DP - 2015 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 027870 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/09/30/027870.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/09/30/027870.full AB - The significance of single-cell transcription resides not only in the cumulative expression strength of the cell population but also in its heterogeneity. We propose a new model that improves the detection of changes in the transcriptional heterogeneity pattern of RNA-Seq data using two heterogeneity parameters: ‘burst proportion’ and ‘burst magnitude’, whose changes are validated using RNA-FISH. Transcriptional ‘co-bursting’ – governed by distinct mechanisms during myoblast proliferation and differentiation – is described here.