Predicting T Cell Mitochondria Hijacking from Tumor Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Data with MitoR

Anna Jiang, Chengshang Lyu and Yue Zhao ()
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Anna Jiang: Department of Computer Science, College of Science, Mathematics and Technology, Wenzhou-Kean University, Wenzhou 325060, China
Chengshang Lyu: Department of Biomedical Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Yue Zhao: Department of Computer Science, College of Science, Mathematics and Technology, Wenzhou-Kean University, Wenzhou 325060, China

Mathematics, 2025, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-20

Abstract: T cells play a crucial role in the immune system by identifying and eliminating tumor cells. Malignant cancer cells can hijack mitochondria (MT) from nearby T cells, affecting their metabolism and weakening their immune functions. This phenomenon, observed through co-culture systems and fluorescent labeling, has been further explored with the development of the MERCI algorithm, which predicts T cell MT hijacking in cancer cells using single-cell RNA (scRNA) sequencing data. However, MERCI is limited by its reliance on a linear model and its inability to handle data sparsity. To address these challenges, we introduce MitoR, a computational algorithm using a Poisson–Gamma mixture model to predict T cell MT hijacking from tumor scRNA data. In performance comparisons, MitoR demonstrated improved performance compared to MERCI’s on gold-standard benchmark datasets scRNA-bench1 (top AUROC: 0.761, top accuracy: 0.769) and scRNA-bench2 (top AUROC: 0.730, top accuracy: 0.733). Additionally, MitoR showed an average 4.14% increase in AUROC and an average 3.86% increase in accuracy over MERCI in all rank strategies and simulated datasets. Finally, MitoR revealed T cell MT hijacking events in two real-world tumor datasets (basal cell carcinoma and esophageal squamous-cell carcinoma), highlighting their role in tumor immune evasion.

Keywords: mitochondria; cancer; T cell (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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