Engelhardt Research Group
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thebeehive.bsky.social
Engelhardt Research Group
@thebeehive.bsky.social
Engelhardt Research Group at Stanford University and Gladstone Institutes. Statistical genomics, live-cell imaging, wearable data, cancer immunology, reproductive health.
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 - ragnhildlaursen/NNMF: Neighborhood Non-Negative Matrix Factorization
Neighborhood Non-Negative Matrix Factorization. Contribute to ragnhildlaursen/NNMF development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
April 29, 2025 at 10:21 PM
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.
April 29, 2025 at 10:21 PM
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.
April 29, 2025 at 10:21 PM
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.
April 29, 2025 at 10:21 PM
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!
April 29, 2025 at 10:21 PM
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.
April 29, 2025 at 10:21 PM
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.
April 29, 2025 at 10:21 PM
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!
April 29, 2025 at 10:21 PM
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.
April 29, 2025 at 10:21 PM
Me three!
November 28, 2024 at 1:31 PM
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!)! 🎉
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
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 - vanvalenlab/Caliban-2024_Schwartz_et_al
Contribute to vanvalenlab/Caliban-2024_Schwartz_et_al development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
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 - 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
github.com
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
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.
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
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.
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
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.
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
Even more exciting, the speed of cancer cells decreased after interactions with T cells, as did their overall size (indicating stress).
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
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.
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
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.
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
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.
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
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).
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
We found that T cell proliferation increased in the two beneficial KO T cells, in the CUL5 KO T cells in particular.
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM
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.
November 26, 2024 at 2:01 AM