Identification of cancer subtypes from single-cell RNA-seq data using a consensus clustering method

BACKGROUND: Human cancers are complex ecosystems composed of cells with distinct molecular signatures. Such intratumoral heterogeneity poses a major challenge to cancer diagnosis and treatment. Recent advancements of single-cell techniques such as scRNA-seq have brought unprecedented insights into cellular heterogeneity. Subsequently, a challenging computational problem is to cluster high dimensional noisy datasets with substantially fewer cells than the number of genes. METHODS: In this paper, we introduced a consensus clustering framework conCluster, for cancer subtype identification from single-cell RNA-seq data. Using an ensemble strategy, conCluster fuses multiple basic partitions to consensus clusters. RESULTS: Applied to real cancer scRNA-seq datasets, conCluster can more accurately detect cancer subtypes than the widely used scRNA-seq clustering methods. Further, we conducted co-expression network analysis for the identified melanoma subtypes. CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis demonstrates that these subtypes exhibit distinct gene co-expression networks and significant gene sets with different functional enrichment.