Digital Sorting Algorithm (DSA) for heterogeneous samples:
Cellular heterogeneity is present in almost all gene expression profiles. However, transcriptome analysis of tissue specimens often ignores the cellular heterogeneity present in these samples. Standard deconvolution algorithms require prior knowledge of the cell type frequencies within a tissue or their in vitro expression profiles. Furthermore, these algorithms tend to report biased estimations.
Here, we describe a Digital Sorting Algorithm (DSA) for extracting cell-type specific gene expression profiles from mixed tissue samples that is unbiased and does not require prior knowledge of cell type frequencies.
Source code of the proposed algorithm is freely available at http://www.github.com/zhandong/DSA