New avenues for systematically inferring cellcell communication:through single-cell transcriptomics data

For multicellular organisms,cell-cell communication is essential to numerous biological processes.Drawing upon the latest development of single-cell RNA-sequencing(scRNA-seq),high-resolution transcriptomic data have deepened our understanding of cellular phenotype heterogeneity and composition of complex tissues,which enables systematic cell-cell communication studies at a single-cell level.We first summarize a common workflow of cell-cell communication study using scRNA-seq data,which often includes data preparation,construction of communication networks,and result validation.Two common strategies taken to uncover cell-cell communications are reviewed,e.g.,physically vicinal structure-based and ligand-receptor interaction-based one.To conclude,challenges and current applications of cell-cell communication studies at a single-cell resolution are discussed in details and future perspectives are proposed.