genesorteR: Feature Ranking in Clustered Single Cell Data

ABSTRACT Marker genes identified in single cell experiments are expected to be highly specific to a certain cell type and highly expressed in that cell type. Detecting a gene by differential expression analysis does not necessarily satisfy those two conditions and is typically computationally expensive for large cell numbers. Here we present genesorteR, an R package that ranks features in single cell data in a manner consistent with the expected definition of marker genes in experimental biology research. We benchmark genesorteR using various data sets and show that it is distinctly more accurate in large single cell data sets compared to other methods. genesorteR is orders of magnitude faster than current implementations of differential expression analysis methods, can operate on data containing millions of cells and is applicable to both single cell RNA-Seq and single cell ATAC-Seq data. genesorteR is available at https://github.com/mahmoudibrahim/genesorteR .