BiGCN Learns B Cell Functional States by Integrating Single‐Cell Transcriptomes and BCR Repertoires
B lymphocytes are pivotal players in immune regulation and disease progression, yet their full functional diversity has remained elusive due to the siloed analysis of single-cell transcriptomes and B cell receptor (BCR) repertoires. Here, we present BiGCN, a novel method that explicitly integrates transcriptomic and BCR data at single-cell resolution. By uniting these two modalities within a unified embedding using a graph convolutional network (GCN) framework, BiGCN enables high-fidelity characterization of B cell states and clonal relationships. Applying BiGCN across a wide spectrum of paired single - cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and single -cell BCR sequencing (scBCR-seq) datasets, including infectious disease, autoimmunity, and a comprehensive pan-cancer atlas, we demonstrate that BiGCN markedly outperforms existing approaches in information integration, functional annotation, and biological insight. BiGCN not only recapitulates the trajectory from B cell maturation to immunoglobulin class switching but also discovers intermediate B cell subtypes and reveals functional states that are otherwise obscured by conventional analyses. Our results establish BiGCN as a versatile and robust platform for B cells research, accelerating discoveries in immunology, cancer biology, and systems medicine.
Authors
- X. Liu
- Jiwei Huang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1463-670X)
- Dongxi Xiang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9192-6295)
- Grant Wei (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7143-3773)
- Ying Liu
- Shuang Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0811-0696)
- Shasha Zhao
Institutions
- Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN)
- Renji Hospital (CN)
- Jiading District Central Hospital (CN)
- Shanghai Cancer Institute (CN)
- Institute for Biomedicine (IT)
- Hangzhou Dianzi University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Small Methods
- Published
- 2026-02-22
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/smtd.202501919
- Primary Topic
- Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00