Skip to contents

devil is an R package for differential expression analysis in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. It implements the statistical model described in Santacatterina, Tosato et al. It supports both single- and multi-patient experimental designs, implementing robust statistical methods to identify differentially expressed genes while accounting for technical and biological variability.

Key features are:

  1. Flexible experimental design support (single/multiple patients)
  2. Robust statistical testing framework
  3. Efficient implementation for large-scale datasets

Citation

If you use devil, please cite:

  • G. Santacatterina, N. Tosato, S. Milite, K. Davydzenka, E. Insaghi, G. Sanguinetti, S. Cozzini, L. Egidi, G. Caravagna. Scalable, fast and accurate differential gene expression testing from millions of cells of multiple patients. Nat Commun (2026).

Installation

You can install the current version of devil from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("caravagnalab/devil")

We also provide two detailed vignettes for both CPU and GPU installation:


Giulio Caravagna, Giovanni Santacatterina. Cancer Data Science (CDS) Laboratory.