Evaluating performance and applications of sample-wise cell deconvolution methods on human brain transcriptomic data

Sample-wise deconvolution methods have been developed to estimate cell-type proportions and gene expressions in bulk-tissue samples. However, the performance of these methods and their biological applications has not been evaluated, particularly on human brain transcriptomic data. Here, nine deconvolution methods were evaluated with sample-matched data from bulk-tissue RNAseq, single-cell/nuclei (sc/sn) RNAseq, and immunohistochemistry. A total of 1,130,767 nuclei/cells from 149 adult postmortem brains and 72 organoid samples were used. The results showed the best performance of dtangle for estimating cell proportions and bMIND for estimating sample-wise cell-type gene expression. For eight brain cell types, 25,273 cell-type eQTLs were identified with deconvoluted expressions (decon-eQTLs). The results showed that decon-eQTLs explained more schizophrenia GWAS heritability than bulk-tissue or single-cell eQTLs alone. Differential gene expression associated with multiple phenotypes were also examined using the deconvoluted data. Our findings, which were replicated in bulk-tissue RNAseq and sc/snRNAseq data, provided new insights into the biological applications of deconvoluted data.