Basel researchers release Bonsai for visualizing high-dimensional biology data

University of Basel researchers have released Bonsai, software that represents high-dimensional biological data as a branching tree rather than a two-dimensional map. The team says branch distances reflect relationships in the original high-dimensional space. In simulated and real single-cell RNA-sequencing data, the researchers report that Bonsai more accurately reconstructed developmental pathways and identified similar cells than existing methods. Applying it to human blood-cell data recovered known cell relationships and identified a reported natural-killer-cell subtype with a different lineage signature.