CMS4 CRC single-cell immune-state analysis integrating Seurat, Harmony, Azimuth, pseudobulk DESeq2, pathway GSEA, and African ancestry.
# CMS4 CRC Single-Cell Immune States and African-Ancestry Analysis
**Single-cell immune-state analysis of CMS4 colorectal cancer integrating lineage-specific Seurat workflows, compartment-specific QC, Harmony batch integration, Azimuth reference annotation, patient-level subtype composition, pseudobulk DESeq2, and GO/Hallmark pathway enrichment across African-ancestry groups.**
## Scientific question
Within CMS4 CRC, do tumor-infiltrating immune populations differ in **cell state, subtype composition, transcriptional programs, and pathway activity** across African-ancestry groups?
This is distinct from both the cellular-composition project and the inferCNV project:
```text
single-cell CRC program
|
+-- cellular composition repo
| patient-level proportions + CMS composition
|
+-- THIS REPO
| CD8 / CD4 / B / M2 / mast / progenitor immune states
| Harmony + Azimuth + pseudobulk DE + GSEA
|
+-- CMS4 inferCNV repo
malignant-cell CNV + clonal evolution
```
## 1. Immune-compartment workflow
Dedicated source scripts exist for **CD8 T cells, CD4 T cells, B cells, M2/TAM-like macrophages, mast cells, and CLP/progenitor-like populations**.
The repeated source architecture is technically substantial. For example, the CD8 workflow reads 10x H5 matrices from four batches, merges Seurat objects, identifies CD8 candidates with a CD3D/CD3E/CD8A/CD8B module score, and then performs compartment-specific QC.
The source QC thresholds are:
```text
nFeature_RNA > 500
nFeature_RNA violin = ancestry-group distribution; dots = individual patients colored by KRAS status.
This genotype overlay is descriptive unless formally entered into an adjusted statistical model.
## Statistical design
| Layer | Biological replicate | Method |
|---|---|---|
| Immune-state embedding | cell | Seurat / Harmony |
| Reference annotation | cell | Azimuth |
| Functional markers | cell | FeaturePlot / module interpretation |
| Subtype composition | patient | patient-level percentages | …