Specific splice junction detection in single cells with SICILIAN

Dehghannasiri, Roozbeh; Olivieri, Julia Eve; Damljanovic, Ana; Salzman, Julia

Precise splice junction calls are currently unavailable in scRNA-seq pipelines such as the 10x Chromium platform but are critical for understanding single-cell biology. Here, we introduce SICILIAN, a new method that assigns statistical confidence to splice junctions from a spliced aligner to improve precision. SICILIAN is a general method that can be applied to bulk or single-cell data, but has particular utility for single-cell analysis due to that data’s unique challenges and opportunities for discovery. SICILIAN’s precise splice detection achieves high accuracy on simulated data, improves concordance between matched single-cell and bulk datasets, and increases agreement between biological replicates. SICILIAN detects unannotated splicing in single cells, enabling the discovery of novel splicing regulation through single-cell analysis workflows. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13059-021-02434-8.