Single cell RNA-seq libraries of organoid derived material, and KIT + enriched cells from fetal and adult intestines were sequenced on an Illumina NextSeq platform, at a median sequencing depth of 49,861 reads per cell. Reads were mapped to a human genome (hg38) integrated with the Clover transcript using STAR (version 2.7.8a), reads with multiple mapping positions were excluded. Reads were associated with genes if they were mapped to an exon. Reads were demultiplexed and collapsed into UMI tables using umi_tools (version 1.1.1) allowing up to one hamming distance of the cell barcode. Cells with less than 500 UMI, or with more than 40% mitochondrial genes were excluded from analysis.
All analysis was performed in R. We used the MetaCell package 17 (
link) to analyze all scRNA-seq data collected in this study. Default parameters were used unless otherwise stated. We derived a metacell cover of DAPI -/AVIL-Clover + and DAPI -epithelial cells from human ileal organoids. Mitochondrial genes and the highly variable immunoglobulin genes (IGH, IGK and IGL prefixes) were removed from the UMI tables. Gene features for metacell covers were selected using the parameter Tvm=0.1, total umi > 10, and more than 3 UMI in at least 3 cells.
We filtered the list of gene features used for metacell analysis from genes associated with cell cycle, immediate stress response and gene modules inducing strong patient-specific biases.
To this end, we first identified all genes with a correlation coefficient of at least 0.13 for one of the anchor genes TOP2A, NKI67, PCNA, MCM4, UBE2C, STMN1, FOS, EGR1, IER3, FOSB, HSPA1B, HSPA1A, HSP90AA1, and DNAJB1. We then hierarchically clustered the correlation matrix between these genes (filtering genes with low coverage and computing correlation using a down-sampled UMI matrix) and selected the gene clusters that contained the above anchor genes. We thus retained 94 genes as features. We used metacell to build a kNN graph, perform boot-strapped co-clustering (500 iterations; resampling 70% of the cells in each iteration), and derive a cover of the co-clustering kNN graph (K=30). Outlier cells featuring gene expression higher than 4-fold than the geometric mean in the metacells in at least one gene were discarded. Detailed annotation of the different tuft and epithelial cell subsets was performed using hierarchical clustering of the metacell confusion matrix.
ClusterProfiler 18 (version 3.14.0) and ChIPpeakAnno (version 3.20.0) were applied to perform gene functional annotation of differentially expressed genes.
scRNA-seq of passage 1 KIT -and KIT + derived organoids was performed using the Chromium Next GEM Single Cell 3' v 3.1 platform, and sequenced on an Illumina NovaSeq6000 platform.
Reads were mapped to the human genome (hg38) and demultiplexed using cellranger (version 7.1.0). Recovered cellplex barcodes were used to assign single cells to experimental batches. Single cells with less than 64 UMI of a specific cellplex barcodes were discarded from down-stream analysis. Single cells with less than 8-fold UMI count ratio between highest and second highest cellplex barcodes were marked as doublets and discarded from downstream analysis. Single cells with less than 1,000 genomic UMIs or more than 20% mitochondrial content failed to pass QC and were discarded from further analysis, resulting in 10,311 QC-positive cells.
Clustering of passage 1 KIT -and KIT + derived organoids was performed as stated above.
Gene features for the metacell covers were selected using the parameter Tvm=0.1, total umi > 15, and more than 3 UMI in at least 3 cells, resulting in 228 features.
We reanalyzed scRNA-seq data from human primary intestinal tissue 19 . We selected 15,184 single cells from healthy adult small intestine, with >1,000 and <20,000 total UMI for further analysis. Cells were analyzed with the metacell package as previously described to derive a 2D representation of the data for Extended Data Figures 2i and5a. Otherwise, we used predefined annotations to epithelial cell types. In Fig. 2h and 3m we sampled 500 cells from each cell types out of the total 77,364 healthy adult single cells in that database.
Huang L., Bernink J.H., Giladi A., Krueger D., Son G.v., Geurts M.H., Busslinger G., Lin L., Zandvliet M.M., Peters P.J., López‐Iglesias C., Buskens C.J., Bemelman W.A., Begthel H., & Clevers H. (2024). Tuft cells act as regenerative stem cells in the human intestine.