The curses of performing differential expression analysis using single-cell data

Abstract

Differential expression analysis is pivotal in single-cell transcriptomics for unraveling cell-type– specific responses to stimuli. While numerous methods are available to identify differentially expressed genes in single-cell data, recent evaluations of both single-cell–specific methods and methods adapted from bulk studies have revealed significant shortcomings in performance. In this paper, we dissect the four major challenges in single-cell DE analysis: normalization, excessive zeros, donor effects, and cumulative biases. These “curses” underscore the limitations and conceptual pitfalls in existing workflows. In response, we introduce a novel paradigm addressing several of these issues.