1. Program

Session 1: Processing bulk and single-cell ATAC-seq reads

Lecture 1: Bulk ATAC-seq experimental approaches

15’

  • Introduction to bulk ATAC-seq methods: “classic”, omniATAC-seq, low input ATAC-seq, …

Hands-on 1: Processing bulk ATAC-seq data

35’

  • Sequencing QC
  • Mapping reads and correcting
  • Visualizing and QC-ing the results

Exercise 1: Inspecting bulk ATAC-seq outputs

10’

  • Visually inspect the generated tracks and the identifed peaks
  • Get the distribution of fragment sizes over ATAC peaks.
  • Compare this distribution to the previous one. Discuss.

Lecture 2: Single-cell ATAC-seq experimental approaches

20’

  • Introduction to “single cell” ATAC-seq methods: droplet-based scATACseq, indexed scATACseq, joint scRNAseq and scATACseq

Hands-on 2: Processing single-cell ATAC-seq data

30’

  • 10X scATACseq: from reads to matrix counts with cellranger
  • QC-ing with Loupe

Exercise 2: bulk versus single-cell ATAC-seq

10’

  • Compare aggregated signal obtained from single-cell ATAC-seq to that of bulk ATAC-seq

Homework: Download raw data from GSE and process it

  • Install cellranger and mapping tools
  • Download reads from GSE129785 and GSE87646

Session 2: Peak-centered differential accessibility analysis

Lecture 3: Clustering single-cell data

20’

  • Normalizing scATACseq data
  • Clustering approaches
  • Annotating cell types

Hands-on 3: Downstream analysis of scATACseq data

30’

  • Reading cellranger output in R
  • Normalizing scATACseq counts
  • Clustering cells by their accessible loci
  • Differential accessibility assay with Seurat

Exercise 3: Recovering genes associated with cluster-specific peaks

10’

  • Identify the genes associated with cluster-specific peaks

Lecture 4: ATAC-seq and accessibility peaks

20’

  • Peaks in bulk ATAC-seq vs single-cell ATAC-seq
  • Integrating peak sets from different experiments
  • Finding enriched sequences

Hands-on 4: Peaks differential accessibility analysis

30’

  • Quantifying accessibility at ATAC peaks
  • Differential accessibility assay
  • Clustering peak sets

Exercise 4: Peak location vs genomic features

10’

  • Find which types of chromatin stats are enriched in accessible loci

Homework

  • Group peaks by accessibility scores in different samples / cells
  • Perform gene ontology over-representation analyses (GOA)
  • Perform gene Set Enrichment Analyses (GSEA)

Session 3: Advanced topics and multi-omics integration

Lecture 5: Motif enrichment analysis

20’

  • The good, the bad and the ugly: Ref. sequence, ref. annotations and ref. version!
  • Tools to perform motif enrichment analysis
  • Public databases for transcription factor binding sites (TFBS)

Hands-on 5: Find motifs enriched in peak sets

30’

  • Use web-based or command-line meme software to find de novo motifs enriched in a set of peaks
  • Scan sets of peaks for known TF binding sites

Hands-on 5: Find motifs enriched in peak sets

10’

  • Compare de novo found motifs to public databases with fimo

Topic 6: Inferring regulatory networks from scATACseq

1h’

  • CICERO

Homework

  • Find TF motifs enriched in peaks with increased accessibility in a specific cluster
  • Run chromVAR on a single-cell dataset
  • Leverage the motifmatchr package to replicate the ugly nested apply functions in Hands-on # 5