Abstract
Bulk tissue rhythms arise from the coordination of thousands of individual cellular oscillations. Bulk rhythm amplitude differences may reflect changes in the amplitude of the underlying cellular oscillators or changes in their temporal coherence. To resolve this fundamental ambiguity, we developed ORPHEUS ( O scillatory R hythm P hase H eterogeneity E stimated U sing S tatistical-moments), an analytical method that quantifies cellular desynchrony by leveraging the unique 12hr rhythmic signature it imparts on intercellular expression variance. After validating ORPHEUS in silico and on data from the mouse suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), we applied it to data from the mouse liver and human brain to uncover disease- and pathway-related differences in intercellular synchrony. In both tissues, we found that circadian synchrony is higher in cells and samples with higher MTORC activity. Most critically, we observed a dramatic loss of cellular synchrony in excitatory neurons from subjects with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) dementia. By decoupling the influence of cellular amplitude and synchrony, ORPHEUS introduces a new, interpretable tool for analyzing circadian coordination in time-course single-cell data.