SAREV: A review on statistical analytics of single-cell RNA sequencing data.

Abstract

Due to the development of next-generation RNA sequencing (NGS) technologies, there has been tremendous progress in research involving determining the role of genomics, transcriptomics and epigenomics in complex biological systems. However, scientists have realized that information obtained using earlier technology, frequently called 'bulk RNA-seq' data, provides information averaged across all the cells present in a tissue. Relatively newly developed single cell (scRNA-seq) technology allows us to provide transcriptomic information at a single-cell resolution. Nevertheless, these high-resolution data have their own complex natures and demand novel statistical data analysis methods to provide effective and highly accurate results on complex biological systems. In this review, we cover many such recently developed statistical methods for researchers wanting to pursue scRNA-seq statistical and computational research as well as scientific research about these existing methods and free software tools available for their generated data. This review is certainly not exhaustive due to page limitations. We have tried to cover the popular methods starting from quality control to the downstream analysis of finding differentially expressed genes and concluding with a brief description of network analysis.