MANGEM: A web app for multimodal analysis of neuronal gene expression, electrophysiology, and morphology

Patterns (N Y). 2023 Sep 25;4(11):100847. doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2023.100847. eCollection 2023 Nov 10.

Abstract

Single-cell techniques like Patch-seq have enabled the acquisition of multimodal data from individual neuronal cells, offering systematic insights into neuronal functions. However, these data can be heterogeneous and noisy. To address this, machine learning methods have been used to align cells from different modalities onto a low-dimensional latent space, revealing multimodal cell clusters. The use of those methods can be challenging without computational expertise or suitable computing infrastructure for computationally expensive methods. To address this, we developed a cloud-based web application, MANGEM (multimodal analysis of neuronal gene expression, electrophysiology, and morphology). MANGEM provides a step-by-step accessible and user-friendly interface to machine learning alignment methods of neuronal multimodal data. It can run asynchronously for large-scale data alignment, provide users with various downstream analyses of aligned cells, and visualize the analytic results. We demonstrated the usage of MANGEM by aligning multimodal data of neuronal cells in the mouse visual cortex.

Keywords: asynchronous computation; cloud-based machine learning; cross-modal cell clusters and phenotypes; gene expression; manifold learning; multimodal data alignment; neuronal electrophysiology and morphology; patch-seq analysis; single-cell multimodalities; web application.