nichenetr
NicheNet: predict active ligand-target links between interacting cells
nichenetr: the R implementation of the NicheNet method. The goal of NicheNet is to study intercellular communication from a computational perspective. NicheNet uses human or mouse gene expression data of interacting cells as input and combines this with a prior model that integrates existing knowledge on ligand-to-target signaling paths. This allows to predict ligand-receptor interactions that might drive gene expression changes in cells of interest. This model of prior information on potential ligand-target links can then be used to infer active ligand-target links between interacting cells. NicheNet prioritizes ligands according to their activity (i.e., how well they predict observed changes in gene expression in the receiver cell) and looks for affected targets with high potential to be regulated by these prioritized ligands.