Alignment of single-cell RNA-seq samples without over-correction using kernel density matching

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology is poised to replace bulk cell RNA sequencing for most biological and medical applications as it allows users to measure gene expression levels in a cell-type-specific manner. However, data produced by scRNA-seq often exhibit batch effects that can be specific to a cell-type, to a sample, or to an experiment, which prevent integration or comparisons across multiple experiments. Here, we present Dmatch, a method that leverages an external expression atlas of human primary cells and kernel density matching to align multiple scRNA-seq experiments for downstream biological analysis. Dmatch facilitates alignment of scRNA-seq datasets with cell-types that may overlap only partially, and thus allows integration of multiple distinct scRNA-seq experiments to extract biological insights. In simulation, Dmatch compares favorably to other alignment methods, both in terms of reducing sample-specific clustering, and in terms of avoiding over-correction. When applied to scRNA-seq data collected from clinical samples in a healthy individual and five autoimmune disease patients, Dmatch enabled cell-type-specific differential gene expression comparisons across biopsy sites and disease conditions, and uncovered a shared population of pro-inflammatory monocytes across biopsy sites in RA patients. We further show that Dmatch increases the number of eQTLs mapped from population scRNA-seq data. Dmatch is fast, scalable, and improves the utility of scRNA-seq for several important applications. Dmatch is freely available online (https://qzhan321.github.io/dmatch/).