iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Wish I were in Baltimore for this! Looks super exciting and forward thinking.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Please join us for these incredible papers and discussions with authors on important issues for the NeurIPS community 🤩

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

We are really proud of this work. Please try out NNMF on all of your gene count spatial transcriptomics data, whether you need hard clusters or scalable, interpretable, spatially aware dimension reduction! Feedback welcome!! github.com/ragnhildlaur...

github.com

GitHub - ragnhildlaursen/NNMF: Neighborhood Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

Neighborhood Non-Negative Matrix Factorization. Contribute to ragnhildlaursen/NNMF development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

On these CRC data, we studied the factors based on their top ten genes. We found immune-dominated factors & factors capturing intra- and peri-tumoral stroma, among others. Importantly, some factors were shared x patients and some were patient specific, characterizing tumor-specific immune responses.

genes characterizing the 30 NNMF factors in the CRC data.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Then, we applied NNMF to MERFISH data publicly released by Vizgen (vizgen.com/data-release...) that includes 500 genes in ∼1.9 million cells from two human colon cancer samples. NNMF showed enormous complexity, where each factor included many cell types and identified detailed biological structure.

Top row: cell types in two patient samples; Bottom row: NNMF signatures in the same two samples, showing substantial complexity.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

On the same MERFISH mouse brain data, we aligned the eight parallel slices and ran NNMF on the 3D aligned data. NNMF easily labeled the important regions in 3D, and smoothed the factors across all three dimensions.

NNMF factor 1 and factor 7 across the 3D aligned brain slices.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Next, we ran NNMF on MERFISH single mouse hypothalamus data with eight parallel slices on each individual slice (2D). NNMF + K-means produces hard clusters that match the manual clustering well. But the real story is how much detail and biological complexity soft clusterings add. Vasculature!

hard clustering for NNMF + Kmeans, BASS, and MENDER on two parallel samples.

All of the ten factors from NNMF in a single sample, colored by weights.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

On human brain 10X Visium data and mouse brain MERFISH data, we compared MENDER and BASS to NNMF in terms of run time, and found that MENDER is fastest and NNMF is a close second. However, MENDER uses cell type labels for the hard clustering, not gene counts, and produces poor clusterings.

run time comparison for human brain and mouse merfish across BASS, MENDER, and NNMF.

Hard clusters from a manual annotation, NNMF's top signature, NNMF+K-means, BASS, and MENDER on the human brain data.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

We use the very cool hard clustering benchmark system pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38491270/ and compared NNMF to fourteen state-of-the-art spatially-aware hard clustering methods, showing good performance of NNMF even in the hard clustering scenario.

Benchmark comparison across five datasets and three metrics, for 15 different methods.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

NNMF works by using standard NMF updates, but using Gaussian smoothing of the factor weights on each spot at each iteration that encourages similar weights for spots nearby in space. No matrix inversion needed!

Graphical description of Neighborhood NMF, including its input and how we determined the number of factors.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

NNMF is available in R, performs nonnegative matrix factorization on the gene counts that yields soft clusterings of every spot in spatial transcriptomics, and scales to many samples, arbitrary dimensions, & millions of spots. We run K-means on the soft cluster weights to get a NNSF hard clustering.

example of factor weights on mouse brain sample, and the gene programs that define each factor. Then we use K-means to built a hard clustering.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Exciting update!! @bioimagearchive.bsky.social is now hosting the first publicly available Incucyte data! If you have live-cell imaging data, please consider uploading to this amazing repository!! Thanks to Julia Carnevale and Alex Marson for experimental data — www.ebi.ac.uk/biostudies/b...

ebi.ac.uk

BioStudies < The European Bioinformatics Institute < EMBL-EBI

BioStudies – one package for all the data supporting a study

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Feedback welcome! And please play with these data! There is a lot more signal there. Thank you to @bioimagearchive.bsky.social for hosting these Incucyte image data -- this is a new thing for them, and they have been so kind in working through the details of submission (link coming soon!)! 🎉

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Try out Caliban and Occident on your own Incucyte data! More phenotypes and analyses added regularly. github.com/vanvalenlab/... github.com/bee-hive/occ...

github.com

GitHub - vanvalenlab/Caliban-2024_Schwartz_et_al

Contribute to vanvalenlab/Caliban-2024_Schwartz_et_al development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

With five new collaborations in the works, and a paper characterizing the differences using explainable AI already accepted as an oral presentation at #PSB2025 (lead by high school senior Marcus Blennemann), look for future work in this space! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

github.com

GitHub - bee-hive/occident: Github repo for Occident Website hosting Live Cell Image Data

Github repo for Occident Website hosting Live Cell Image Data - bee-hive/occident

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

In summary, we found that, compared to the SH KO control condition, TCR T cells with the RASA2 KO have a longer dwell time and cripple cancer cells more effectively this way, whereas TCR T cells with the CUL5 KO proliferated more frequently upon activation, adding more T cells to the fight.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

With a Markov model, we deconvolved when, in frame t-1, there is one cancer cell and one T cell in a window, and in frame t there is one cancer cell and two T cells. We were able to quantify how often this doubling of T cells attacking a cancer cell was due to proliferation or due to recruitment.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Most thrilling is that we can identify active T cells based on relative cell size and morphology, and watch T cells activate (differentially based on condition) after interacting with cancer cells.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Even more exciting, the speed of cancer cells decreased after interactions with T cells, as did their overall size (indicating stress).

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

While the # of T cell--cancer cell interactions increased similarly, these interactions & their effects were modulated by the CRISPR KOs. E.g., the time a T cell remained attached to a cancer cell (as estimated by a negative binomial and Markov model separately) was highest in RASA2 KO T cells.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Cancer cell and T cell morphology changes dramatically depending on state. These changes are visible in the brightfield imaging – active interacting T cells are larger and change to less circular shapes. Cancer cell begin to aggregate together when interacting with T cells.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

We found that the number of T cells attached to cancer cells reduces the likelihood that the cancer cell will proliferate, with the beneficial KO T cells having greater effects on proliferation reduction.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

We can study differences in cancer cell division events (lower in beneficial KO T cells) and average T cell speed (faster in beneficial KO T cells).

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

We found that T cell proliferation increased in the two beneficial KO T cells, in the CUL5 KO T cells in particular.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

With the masked, tracked cells, we went to work to develop Occident. We were curious how well the RFP markers captured cancer cell number; we found that RFP lags as a proxy for cancer cell numbers.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Then, the Van Valen Lab developed Caliban to segment and track each cell (green are T cells, red are cancer cells, white are detritus).

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Each well was imaged every 4 minutes at 10X magnification on Sartorius Incucyte for 72 hrs. Images include brightfield, RFP (cancer cell nuclei) channels.

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

We teamed up with Alex Marson and Julia Carnevale’s Labs, who imaged TCR T cells co-cultured with RFP+ A375 tumor cells 3 ways: Safe harbor knockout (SH KO; control), RASA2 KO (Carnevale et al., 2022), CUL5 KO (Liao et al., 2024).

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

…and amazing pack hunting behaviors of the modified T cells:

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

…cancer cell death, which is quite rare in much of these data...

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

A lot of interesting signal is left on the cutting room floor. For example, proliferation (rates) in cancer cells...

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Incucyte live cell imaging is ubiquitous, but from this complex data cancer immunologists typically plot one thing: the number of red pixels in the well, which is a proxy for the cancer cell coverage (RFP marks cancer cell nuclei). From [Carnevale et al. 2022]:

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Engelhardt Research Group @thebeehive.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

First post in the Good Place! Our preprint on cellular behavior analysis in TCR T cells & cancer cell live-cell imaging data is out! This 3-year collaboration led by pd Archit Verma w/ Alex Marson & Julia Carnevale, with segmentation & tracking by @davidvv & team! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Cellular behavior analysis from live-cell imaging of TCR T cell–cancer cell interactions

T cell therapies, such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and T cell receptor (TCR) T cells, are a growing class of anti-cancer treatments. However, expansion to novel indications and beyond l...

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