A step-by-step walkthrough of my multi-sample single-cell RNA sequencing project — written for anyone curious about how computational biology actually works
Before we start - what is this article actually about?
Imagine being able to take a tiny sample of tissue from a patient's gut, and instead of just knowing "there are cells here", you could read the activity of every single gene inside every single individual cell - thousands of cells at once.
That's what single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) does. And in this article, I'll walk you through how I used Python to analyse data from 40,000 human gut cells across 18 patients to understand what makes two similar gut diseases — Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis - biologically different from each other.
No biology PhD required. I'll explain every term as we go.
