A computational method for direct imputation of cell type-specific expression profiles and cellular compositions from bulk-tissue RNA-Seq in brain disorders

The importance of cell type-specific gene expression in disease-relevant tissues is increasingly recognized in genetic studies of complex diseases. However, most gene expression studies are conducted on bulk tissues, without examining cell type-specific expression profiles. Several computational methods are available for cell type deconvolution (i.e. inference of cellular composition) from bulk RNA-Seq data, but few of them impute cell type-specific expression profiles. We hypothesize that with external prior information such as single cell RNA-seq and population-wide expression profiles, it can be computationally tractable to estimate both cellular composition and cell type-specific expression from bulk RNA-Seq data. Here we introduce CellR, which addresses cross-individual gene expression variations to adjust the weights of cell-specific gene markers. It then transforms the deconvolution problem into a linear programming model while taking into account inter/intra cellular correlations and uses a multi-variate stochastic search algorithm to estimate the cell type-specific expression profiles. Analyses on several complex diseases such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease and type 2 diabetes validated the efficiency of CellR, while revealing how specific cell types contribute to different diseases. In summary, CellR compares favorably against competing approaches, enabling cell type-specific re-analysis of gene expression data on bulk tissues in complex diseases.