Merge multiple instances of the same seurat object where steps were performed in parallel?

[rdalbanus]

Hello,

I'm very excited about the upcoming Seurat 5. While experimenting with some of the new methods, I wondered if there is a way to run different operations in a Seurat object in parallel and then combine them (e.g. using separate scripts and then combining the outputs back into a single object). Is this possible?

The closest I can think of is merge, but it would treat each copy of the seurat object as an independent experiment so that the pre-existing data would be duplicated. The function I have in mind would take two (or more) instances of a Seurat object and update the first object with all the slots only present in the other(s).

Example scenario: Run all the IntegrateLayers methods in parallel from the same starting Seurat object RDS file. Save each output Seurat object in an RDS file. Load all the RDS files and create a single object with all the new slots to compare the integrations.
The alternative is running each step in sequence (time-consuming) or manually adding the embedding/assay to the original object (cumbersome and error-prone). I feel this type of use scenario will become very common with the new layer-based framework.

Cheers

[rdalbanus]

Wrong repository