Version 0.1.0 is a major update to sceptre. Usability and speed are improved considerably.

Usability

  • There is now a single interface to the sceptre algorithm: the function run_sceptre_high_moi (previously called run_sceptre_in_memory). The function run_sceptre_gRNA_gene_pair, which was redundant, is now deprecated.

  • run_sceptre_high_moi is much simpler to use. run_sceptre_high_moi now has only four required arguments: gene_matrix (previously called expression_matrix), gRNA_matrix (previously called expression_matrix), covariate_matrix, and gene_gRNA_pairs. The formerly required arguments storage_dir and side are now set to tempdir() and “both” by default. Additionally, the argument pod_sizes is removed entirely (and handled internally).

  • run_sceptre_high_moi has the additional optional arguments full_output and parallel. full_output controls the complexity of the data frame outputted by the method. When full_output is set to FALSE (the default), run_sceptre_high_moi outputs a data frame with four columns only, all of which are easy to interpret: gene_id, gRNA_id, p_value, and z_value. parallel controls whether the function is parallelized (TRUE; default) or not (FALSE).

  • run_sceptre_high_moi now accepts a raw (i.e., unthresholded) gRNA matrix or a user-thresholded gRNA matrix.

  • The new auxiliary function combine_gRNAs combines gRNAs that target the same chromosomal site, facilitating this common analysis step.

  • Numerous checks have been added to run_sceptre_high_moi ensure that the input is valid. For example, run_sceptre_high_moi checks that gene IDs and gRNA IDs in gene_gRNA_pairs are in fact present in gene_matrix and gRNA_matrix, respectively.

Speed

Two accelerations have been added to improve execution speed.