Heterogeneity in the cellular composition of bulk RNA-seq data may prevent or bias the results from differential expression analysis. To circumvent this limitation, in silico deconvolution infers cell type abundances by modelling gene expression levels as weighted sums of the cell-type specific expression profiles. Several computational methods have been developed to estimate cell type proportions from bulk transcriptomics data, and to account for cell type heterogeneity in the statistical analysis. The R package granulator provides a unified testing interface to rapidly run and benchmark multiple state-of-the-art deconvolution methods. We demonstrate its usage on published bulk RNA-seq data from peripheral blood mononuclear cells.

The methods currently implemented in granulator are reported in Table 1.

Table 1 - Deconvolution methods. List of deconvolution algorithms available in granulator.

granulator can be installed from Bioconductor using:

if (!requireNamespace("BiocManager", quietly = TRUE))
    install.packages("BiocManager")
BiocManager::install("granulator")

The package can be loaded using:

library(granulator)

The datasets included in the package comprises bulk RNA-seq gene expression data of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 12 healthy donors and bulk RNA-seq data of 29 isolated immune cell types from 4 healthy donors (Monaco et al. 2019), publicly available at NCBI database under GEO accession number GSE107011.

We show how to use granulator for the deconvolution of bulk RNA-seq data from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) into the individual cellular components and how to assess the quality of the obtained predictions in the following vignette: Deconvolution of bulk RNA-seq data with granulator.

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Monaco, Gianni, Bernett Lee, Weili Xu, Seri Mustafah, You Yi Hwang, Christophe Carré, Nicolas Burdin, et al. 2019. “RNA-Seq Signatures Normalized by mRNA Abundance Allow Absolute Deconvolution of Human Immune Cell Types.” Cell Reports 26 (6): 1627–1640.e7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2019.01.041.

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