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RNA Velocity

Definition
AI-generated

RNA velocity estimates the direction and rate of change of gene expression for individual cells by contrasting spliced and unspliced mRNA counts (or related dynamical models), predicting short-term transcriptional trends along differentiation or activation processes.

Topics
Single-cell analysis
Synonyms
Dynamical RNA velocity (model-specific variants)
Related
Pseudotime RNA Sequencing (RNA-seq) Single-Cell Expression Quantitative Trait Locus (sc-eQTL)

Why it matters in GWAS

Together with pseudotime and trajectory inference, velocity helps place sc-eQTL and program-level associations in a dynamic context—e.g. whether a variant modulates early vs late transition states—though inference assumptions should match the dataset.

Example usage

"The sc-eQTL for the locus was strongest in early erythroid progenitors with high globin RNA velocity."

Pseudotime RNA Sequencing (RNA-seq) Single-Cell Expression Quantitative Trait Locus (sc-eQTL) Single-Cell Sequencing Trajectory Inference
Related-term network

Click any node to open that term page.

Node order. The current term is first. Next come every page linked from Related terms, in the same top-to-bottom order as that list. Then new terms appear in two-hop layers: for each of those direct neighbors (in that same order), their related terms are appended if not already listed. A third pass does the same for two-hop nodes. The walk stops when a fixed maximum number of nodes is reached.

References

  • La Manno G, et al. (2018). RNA velocity of single cells. Nature.
  • Bergen V, et al. (2020). Generalizing RNA velocity to transient cell states through dynamical modeling. Nat Biotechnol.
  • Dimitrov D, Schrod S, Rohbeck M, et al. (2026). Interpretation, extrapolation and perturbation of single cells. Nat Rev Genet. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41576-025-00920-4
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