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bioRxiv · 10.1101/582064

Droplet scRNA-seq is not zero-inflated

Svensson, V.
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Abstract

Potential users of single cell RNA-sequencing often encounter a choice between high-throughput droplet based methods and high sensitivity plate based methods. In particular there is a widespread belief that single-cell RNA-sequencing will often fail to generate measurements for particular gene, cell pairs due to molecular inefficiencies, causing data to have an overabundance of zero-values. Investigation of published data of technical controls in droplet based single cell RNA-seq experiments demonstrates the number of zeros in the data is consistent with count statistics, indicating that over-abundances of zero-values in biological data are likely due to biological variation as opposed to technical shortcomings.

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Svensson, V.. 2019-03-19. Droplet scRNA-seq is not zero-inflated. https://doi.org/10.1101/582064

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