Selected publications | Wouter Saelens

This only lists our main publications. See Google Scholar for all publications.

2025

Dissecting the Impact of Transcription Factor Dose on Cell Reprogramming Heterogeneity Using scTF-seq

Wangjie Liu^* , Wouter Saelens^* , Pernille Rainer^* , Marjan Biočanin , Vincent Gardeux , Antoni Jakub Gralak , Guido van Mierlo , Angelika Gebhart , Julie Russeil , Tingdang Liu , Wanze Chen and Bart Deplancke

Nature Genetics, Oct 2025

A high-throughput technology to study the effect of transcription factor dose. Applied to reprogramming, it reveals how TF dose affects cell fate heterogeneity.

Reprogramming often yields heterogeneous cell fates, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. To address this, we developed single-cell transcription factor sequencing (scTF-seq), a single-cell technique that induces barcoded, doxycycline-inducible TF overexpression and quantifies TF dose-dependent transcriptomic changes. Applied to mouse embryonic multipotent stromal cells, scTF-seq generated a gain-of-function atlas for 384 mouse TFs, identifying key regulators of lineage specification, cell cycle control and their interplay. Leveraging single-cell resolution, we uncovered how TF dose shapes reprogramming heterogeneity, revealing both dose-dependent and stochastic cell state transitions. We classified TFs into low-capacity and high-capacity groups, with the latter further subdivided by dose sensitivity. Combinatorial scTF-seq demonstrated that TF interactions can shift from synergistic to antagonistic depending on the relative dose. Altogether, scTF-seq enables the dissection of TF function, dose and cell fate control, providing a high-resolution framework to understand and predict reprogramming outcomes, advancing gene regulation research and the design of cell engineering strategies.

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Funkyheatmap: Visualising Data Frames with Mixed Data Types

Robrecht Cannoodt^* , Louise Deconinck^* , Artuur Couckuyt^* , Nikolay S. Markov^* , Luke Zappia , Malte D. Luecken , Marta Interlandi , Yvan Saeys^† and Wouter Saelens^†

Journal of Open Source Software, Apr 2025

A clean and easy way to make complex heatmaps in Python, R and Javascript.

Cannoodt* et al., (2025). funkyheatmap: Visualising data frames with mixed data types. Journal of Open Source Software, 10(108), 7698, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07698

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ChromatinHD Connects Single-Cell DNA Accessibility and Conformation to Gene Expression through Scale-Adaptive Machine Learning

Wouter Saelens , Olga Pushkarev and Bart Deplancke

Nature Communications, Jan 2025

A scale-adaptive machine learning method to link single-cell chromatin accessibility to gene expression. Outperforms peak- and window-based methods by a large margin.

Gene regulation is inherently multiscale, but scale-adaptive machine learning methods that fully exploit this property in single-nucleus accessibility data are still lacking. Here, we develop ChromatinHD, a pair of scale-adaptive models that uses the raw accessibility data, without peak-calling or windows, to link regions to gene expression and determine differentially accessible chromatin. We show how ChromatinHD consistently outperforms existing peak and window-based approaches and find that this is due to a large number of uniquely captured, functional accessibility changes within and outside of putative cis-regulatory regions. Furthermore, ChromatinHD can delineate collaborating regulatory regions, including their preferential genomic conformations, that drive gene expression. Finally, our models also use changes in ATAC-seq fragment lengths to identify dense binding of transcription factors, a feature not captured by footprinting methods. Altogether, ChromatinHD, available at https://chromatinhd.org, is a suite of computational tools that enables a data-driven understanding of chromatin accessibility at various scales and how it relates to gene expression.

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2022

Spatial Proteogenomics Reveals Distinct and Evolutionarily Conserved Hepatic Macrophage Niches

Martin Guilliams, Johnny Bonnardel, Birthe Haest, Bart Vanderborght, Camille Wagner, Anneleen Remmerie, Anna Bujko, Liesbet Martens, Tinne Thoné, Robin Browaeys, 24 more authors, Wouter Saelens^†, Hans Van Vlierberghe^†, Lindsey Devisscher^†, and Charlotte L. Scott^†

Cell, Jan 2022

One of the first comprehensive liver cell atlases combining single-cell and spatial transcriptomics with proteomics. Beside being a key resource, it reveals distinct macrophage niches conserved across species.

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2021

Spearheading Future Omics Analyses Using Dyngen, a Multi-Modal Simulator of Single Cells

Robrecht Cannoodt^* , Wouter Saelens^* , Louise Deconinck and Yvan Saeys

Nature Communications, Jun 2021

A flexible simulator for single-cell multi-omics data, useful for benchmarking computational methods. Builds on a detailed model of gene regulation, splicing, and translation.

We present dyngen, a multi-modal simulation engine for studying dynamic cellular processes at single-cell resolution. dyngen is more flexible than current single-cell simulation engines, and allows better method development and benchmarking, thereby stimulating development and testing of computational methods. We demonstrate its potential for spearheading computational methods on three applications: aligning cell developmental trajectories, cell-specific regulatory network inference and estimation of RNA velocity.

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2020

NicheNet: Modeling Intercellular Communication by Linking Ligands to Target Genes

Robin Browaeys , Wouter Saelens^† and Yvan Saeys^†

Nature Methods, Feb 2020

A widely used method to predict cell-cell communication from single-cell data. It uniquely not only looks at ligand-receptor pairs, which is bound to contain false-positives, but also models downstream target gene regulation to ensure the signaling is actively sensed by the cell.

Computational methods that model how gene expression of a cell is influenced by interacting cells are lacking. We present NicheNet (https://github.com/saeyslab/nichenetr), a method that predicts ligand–target links between interacting cells by combining their expression data with prior knowledge on signaling and gene regulatory networks. We applied NicheNet to tumor and immune cell microenvironment data and demonstrate that NicheNet can infer active ligands and their gene regulatory effects on interacting cells.

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2019

A Comparison of Single-Cell Trajectory Inference Methods

Wouter Saelens^* , Robrecht Cannoodt^* , Helena Todorov and Yvan Saeys

Nature Biotechnology, May 2019

The reference benchmark paper for single-cell trajectory inference methods. People love them or hate them, but everyone uses them.

Trajectory inference approaches analyze genome-wide omics data from thousands of single cells and computationally infer the order of these cells along developmental trajectories. Although more than 70 trajectory inference tools have already been developed, it is challenging to compare their performance because the input they require and output models they produce vary substantially. Here, we benchmark 45 of these methods on 110 real and 229 synthetic datasets for cellular ordering, topology, scalability and usability. Our results highlight the complementarity of existing tools, and that the choice of method should depend mostly on the dataset dimensions and trajectory topology. Based on these results, we develop a set of guidelines to help users select the best method for their dataset. Our freely available data and evaluation pipeline (https://benchmark.dynverse.org) will aid in the development of improved tools designed to analyze increasingly large and complex single-cell datasets.

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2018

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Module Detection Methods for Gene Expression Data

Wouter Saelens , Robrecht Cannoodt and Yvan Saeys

Nature Communications, Mar 2018

Not all module detection methods are created equal: decomposition methods work best - if you can handle the more complex interpretation.

A critical step in the analysis of large genome-wide gene expression datasets is the use of module detection methods to group genes into co-expression modules. Because of limitations of classical clustering methods, numerous alternative module detection methods have been proposed, which improve upon clustering by handling co-expression in only a subset of samples, modelling the regulatory network, and/or allowing overlap between modules. In this study we use known regulatory networks to do a comprehensive and robust evaluation of these different methods. Overall, decomposition methods outperform all other strategies, while we do not find a clear advantage of biclustering and network inference-based approaches on large gene expression datasets. Using our evaluation workflow, we also investigate several practical aspects of module detection, such as parameter estimation and the use of alternative similarity measures, and conclude with recommendations for the further development of these methods.

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