Characterizing transcriptional heterogeneity through pathway and gene set overdispersion analysis (PAGODA)

The extent of transcriptional diversity in mouse NPCs is likely to be influenced by a variety of unexamined factors that include programmed cell death, genomic mosaicism as well as a variety of "environmental" influences such as changes in exposure to signaling lipids. We therefore used scRNA-seq to assess a cohort of cortical NPCs from an embryonic mouse. We demonstrate that PAGODA (Pathway And Geneset OverDispersion Analysis) effectively recovers the known neuroanatomical and functional organization of NPCs, identifying multiple aspects of transcriptional heterogeneity within the developing mouse cortex that are difficult to discern by the existing heterogeneity analysis approaches. Examination of mouse NPC transcriptional heterogeneity via single cell RNA-seq