Kiani et al, Nature Methods 2014

This example reproduces Figure 2, part (a), from Kiani et al, Nature Methods 11: 723 (2014).

In order to keep download sizes reasonable, the files only have about 10% of the original events.

Experimental Layout

This experiment uses a dCas9 fusion to repress the output of a yellow fluorescent reporter. The dCas9 is directed to the repressible promoter by a guide RNA under the control of rtTA3, a transcriptional activator controlled with the small molecule inducer doxycycline (Dox).

The plasmids that were co-transfected are shown below (reproduced from the above publication’s Supplementary Figure 6a.)

Genetic circuit

Genetic circuit

The experiment compares three different conditions: - No dCas9 / no gRNA - No gRNA - The full gene network

Each condition was induced with 0, 100, 500, and 4000 uM Dox.

# change "inline" --> "notebook" if you want to interact with the plots.
# in some buggy versions of the Jupyter notebook, this needs to be in its OWN CELL.

%matplotlib inline
import cytoflow as flow

# if your figures are too big or too small, you can scale them by changing matplotlib's DPI
import matplotlib
matplotlib.rc('figure', dpi = 160)

As is usual with cytoflow, we start by mapping the files to the experimental conditions. We have three different conditions; four different Dox concentrations; and three replicates.

# (Condition, [Dox]) --> filename
inputs = {
    ("Full_Circuit", 0.0) : "Specimen_002_A1_A01.fcs",
    ("Full_Circuit", 100.0) : "Specimen_002_A2_A02.fcs",
    ("Full_Circuit", 500.0) : "Specimen_002_A3_A03.fcs",
    ("Full_Circuit", 4000.0) : "Specimen_002_A4_A04.fcs",
    ("No_gRNA", 0.0) : "Specimen_002_C5_C05.fcs",
    ("No_gRNA", 100.0) : "Specimen_002_C6_C06.fcs",
    ("No_gRNA", 500.0) : "Specimen_002_C7_C07.fcs",
    ("No_gRNA", 4000.0) : "Specimen_002_C8_C08.fcs",
    ("No_Cas9", 0.0) : "Specimen_002_D1_D01.fcs",
    ("No_Cas9", 100.0) : "Specimen_002_D2_D02.fcs",
    ("No_Cas9", 500.0) : "Specimen_002_D3_D03.fcs",
    ("No_Cas9", 4000.0) : "Specimen_002_D4_D04.fcs"}

tubes = []

for repl, path in {1 : "repl1", 2 : "repl2", 3 : "repl3"}.items():
    for (condition, dox), filename in inputs.items():
        tube = flow.Tube(file = path + "/" + filename,
                         conditions = {'Condition' : condition,
                                       'Dox' : dox,
                                       'Replicate' : repl})
        tubes.append(tube)

import_op = flow.ImportOp(conditions = {'Condition' : "category",
                                        'Dox' : "float",
                                        'Replicate' : "int"},
                          tubes = tubes)

ex = import_op.apply()

Have a look at the morphological parameters.

flow.DensityView(xchannel = "FSC-A",
                 ychannel = "SSC-A",
                 xscale = 'log',
                 yscale = 'log').plot(ex, min_quantile = 0.005)
../../_images/kiani_nature_methods_2014_7_0.png

This looks like it’s been pre-gated (ie, there’s not a mixture of populations.) It’s also pushed up against the top axes in both SSC-A and FSC-A, which is a little concerning.

Let’s see how many events we’re getting piled up.

(ex['SSC-A'] == ex['SSC-A'].max()).sum()
5434

Alright. Some events (~5,000 out of 360,000) but not enough to be concerning.

The next thing we usually do is select for positively transfected cells. mKate is the transfection marker, so look at the red channel.

flow.HistogramView(channel = "PE-TxRed YG-A",
                   scale = 'logicle').plot(ex)
../../_images/kiani_nature_methods_2014_11_0.png

Let’s fit a mixture-of-gaussians, for a nice principled way of separating the transfected population from the untransfected population.

gm = flow.GaussianMixtureOp(name = "GM",
                            channels = ["PE-TxRed YG-A"],
                            scale = {'PE-TxRed YG-A' : 'logicle'},
                            num_components = 2)
gm.estimate(ex)
ex_gm = gm.apply(ex)
gm.default_view().plot(ex_gm)
/home/brian/src/cytoflow/cytoflow/operations/base_op_views.py:341: CytoflowViewWarning: Setting 'huefacet' to 'GM'
../../_images/kiani_nature_methods_2014_13_1.png

Looks good: the events with GM == 'GM_2' are the cells in the transfected population. Let’s see how many events were in each population.

ex_gm.data.groupby(['GM']).size()
GM
GM_1    262010
GM_2     97990
dtype: int64

Let’s make a new condition, Transfected, to be a boolean value with whether the cell was in GM_2 or not. Note: ``add_condition`` acts on the ``Experiment`` in-place.

ex_gm.add_condition(name = 'Transfected',
                    dtype = 'bool',
                    data = (ex_gm['GM'] == 'GM_2'))

Now, we can reproduce the bar chart in the publication by taking the output (EYFP, in the FITC-A channel) geometric mean of the positively transfected cells, split out by condition and [Dox]. Don’t forget to look at just the transfected cells (using subset). We’ll compute the geometric mean across circuit and [Dox], and then split it out by replicate so we can compute an SEM.

Please note: This is a terrible place to use error bars. See:

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7428/full/492180a.html

and

http://jcb.rupress.org/content/177/1/7

for the reason why. I’m using them here to demonstrate the capability, rather than argue that you should perform your analysis this way.

ex_stat = flow.ChannelStatisticOp(name = "FITC_mean",
                                  channel = "FITC-A",
                                  by = ["Condition", "Dox"],
                                  function = flow.geom_mean,
                                  subset = "Transfected == True").apply(ex_gm)

ex_stat = flow.ChannelStatisticOp(name = "FITC_by_replicate",
                                  channel = "FITC-A",
                                  by = ["Condition", "Dox", "Replicate"],
                                  function = flow.geom_mean,
                                  subset = "Transfected == True").apply(ex_stat)

ex_stat = flow.TransformStatisticOp(name = "FITC_by_replicate",
                                    statistic = ("FITC_by_replicate", "geom_mean"),
                                    by = ["Condition", "Dox"],
                                    function = flow.geom_sd_range).apply(ex_stat)

flow.BarChartView(statistic = ("FITC_mean", "geom_mean"),
                  error_statistic = ("FITC_by_replicate", "geom_sd_range"),
                  variable = "Condition",
                  scale = "log",
                  huefacet = "Dox").plot(ex_stat,
                                         xlabel = 'Circuit',
                                         ylabel = 'EYFP Geometric Mean (au)',
                                         capsize = 5,
                                         errwidth = 1)
../../_images/kiani_nature_methods_2014_19_0.png

So that’s useful, but maybe there’s more in this data. We’ve noticed in our lab that gene circuit behavior frequently changes as copy number changes. Is this the case here? We can bin the data by transfection level, and see if the behavior changes as the bin number increases. We can also ask that the number of events per bin be included as another piece of metadata, so we can exclude bins with a small number of events.

bin_op = flow.BinningOp(name = "Transfection_Bin",
                        channel = "PE-TxRed YG-A",
                        bin_width = 0.1,
                        scale = "log",
                        bin_count_name = "Transfection_Bin_Count")

ex_bin = bin_op.apply(ex_gm)
flow.HistogramView(channel =  "PE-TxRed YG-A",
                   huefacet = "Transfection_Bin",
                   scale = 'log',
                   huescale = 'log',
                   subset = "Transfected == True & "
                            "Transfection_Bin_Count > 1000").plot(ex_bin,
                                                                  lim = (80, 10000),
                                                                  xlabel = 'mKate2 (au)')
../../_images/kiani_nature_methods_2014_21_0.png

Now plot a line plot with transfection bin on the X-axis and mean FITC output on the Y-axis.

ex_stat = flow.ChannelStatisticOp(name = "FITC_mean",
                                  channel = "FITC-A",
                                  by = ["Condition", "Dox", "Transfection_Bin"],
                                  function = flow.geom_mean,
                                  subset = "Transfected == True & "
                                           "Transfection_Bin_Count > 500").apply(ex_bin)

ex_stat = flow.ChannelStatisticOp(name = "FITC_by_repl",
                                  channel = "FITC-A",
                                  by = ["Condition", "Dox", "Transfection_Bin", "Replicate"],
                                  function = flow.geom_mean,
                                  subset = "Transfected == True & "
                                           "Transfection_Bin_Count > 500").apply(ex_stat)

ex_stat = flow.TransformStatisticOp(name = "FITC_by_repl",
                                    statistic = ("FITC_by_repl", "geom_mean"),
                                    by = ["Condition", "Dox", "Transfection_Bin"],
                                    function = flow.geom_sd_range).apply(ex_stat)

flow.Stats1DView(statistic = ("FITC_mean", "geom_mean"),
                 error_statistic = ("FITC_by_repl", "geom_sd_range"),
                 variable = "Transfection_Bin",
                 huefacet = "Dox",
                 variable_scale = 'linear',
                 scale = 'log',
                 yfacet = "Condition").plot(ex_stat,
                                            xlabel = 'mKate2 Geometric Mean (au)',
                                            ylabel = 'EYFP Geometric Mean (au)',
                                            sharex = False,
                                            capsize = 3)
../../_images/kiani_nature_methods_2014_23_0.png