BISC: accurate inference of transcriptional bursting kinetics from single-cell transcriptomic data

Gene expression in mammalian cells is inherently stochastic and mRNAs are synthesized in discrete bursts. Single-cell transcriptomics provides an unprecedented opportunity to explore the transcriptome-wide kinetics of transcriptional bursting. However, current analysis methods provide limited accuracy in bursting inference due to substantial noise inherent to single-cell transcriptomic data. In this study, we developed BISC, a Bayesian method for inferring bursting parameters from single cell transcriptomic data. Based on a beta-gamma-Poisson model, BISC modeled the mean-variance dependency to achieve accurate estimation of bursting parameters from noisy data. Evaluation based on both simulation and real intron sequential RNA fluorescence in situ hybridization data showed improved accuracy and reliability of BISC over existing methods, especially for genes with low expression values. Further application of BISC found bursting frequency but not bursting size was strongly associated with gene expression regulation. Moreover, our analysis provided new mechanistic insights into the functional role of enhancer and superenhancer by modulating both bursting frequency and size. BISC also formulated a downstream framework to identify differential bursting (in frequency and size separately) genes in samples under different conditions. Applying to multiple datasets (a mouse embryonic cell and fibroblast dataset, a human immune cell dataset and a human pancreatic cell dataset), BISC identified known cell-type signature genes that were missed by differential expression analysis, providing additional insights in understanding the cell-specific stochastic gene transcription. Applying to datasets of human lung and colon cancers, BISC successfully detected tumor signature genes based on alterations in bursting kinetics, which illustrates its value in understanding disease development regarding transcriptional bursting. Collectively, BISC provides a new tool for accurately inferring bursting kinetics and detecting differential bursting genes. This study also produced new insights in the role of transcriptional bursting in regulating gene expression, cell identity and tumor progression.