What problem does it solve?
Reconstructing transcription factor (TF) regulatory networks and quantifying regulon activity from single-cell RNA-seq is complex, resource-intensive, and sensitive to input format and species-specific databases; this Skill codifies the SCENIC pipeline to automate GRN inference, motif-based pruning, and per-cell regulon scoring while surfacing common failure modes and validation checks.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Three-stage SCENIC pipeline: fast GRN inference with RegDiffusion, cisTarget-based regulon pruning, and AUCell per-cell activity scoring.
- Downstream analytics: regulon specificity scores (RSS) to identify master regulators, binary activity matrices, and visualization helpers for embedding and GRN graphs.
- Operational safeguards: checks for raw counts vs log-normalized data, species-matching of gene names, and verification of large cisTarget ranking and motif files to avoid common failures.
- Use Cases: discovering cell-type-specific TFs in mouse or human scRNA-seq, comparing regulon activity across conditions, and exporting regulon/aucell results for further analysis.
Quick Start
Run SCENIC on your AnnData using raw count layer, point to species-matched cisTarget .feather rankings and motif .tbl files, and return the top regulons per cell type.