SCSAP MSS - September 23, 2024 Qing Nie, Ph.D. UC-Irvine

TITLE: Spatiotemporal reconstruction of single-cell omics data

ABSTRACT: Cells make fate decisions in response to dynamic environments, and multicellular structures emerge from multiscale interplays among cells and genes in space and time. The recent single-cell omics technology provides an unprecedented opportunity to profile cells. However, those measurements are taken as static snapshots of many individual cells that often lose spatiotemporal information. How to obtain temporal relationships among cells from such measurements or recover spatial interactions among cells, such as cell-cell communication? In this talk I will first present our newly developed computational tools that dissect transition properties of cells and infer cell-cell communication based on nonspatial single-cell data. Then I will present methods to derive multicellular spatiotemporal pattern and cell-cell communication from spatial transcriptomics datasets as well as computational tools for data integration. Through applications of those methods to several complex systems in development, regeneration, and diseases, we show the discovery power of such methods and identify areas for further development for spatiotemporal reconstruction of single-cell genomics data.