Teichlab / cellphonedb

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P-values high across clusters? [conceptual question] #350

Open bhavyaac opened 3 years ago

bhavyaac commented 3 years ago

Hello! I have a conceptual question regarding the meaning of the p-values generated by CellphoneDB.

I understood from the protocols paper by Efremova et al. (2020) that the p-value indicates the likelihood of the interaction being specific to a given cluster / cell-type. Therefore, I would expect that low p-values would only be present between a few clusters for a given gene interaction. However, in my dot plot of CellphoneDB results, I obtain results such as these:

image

where interactions such as CD74_MIF and EGFR_AREG have low p-values across several combinations of clusters.

How is this possible? Please let me know what you think.