A Primary View on Single-Cell Bioinformatics

摘要

Cells are not created equal. The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) project aims to build the atlas of all human cell types and cell states with their molecular signatures. Single-cell sequencing especially single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) is the key technology for obtaining the molecular signatures of a large amount of single cells at the whole transcriptome scale. It is a fundamental step toward the complete understanding of the human body, a super complex system composed of tens of trillions of cells that are all developed from a single cell. This opens the new broad field of single-cell biology. Single-cell biology converts each cell to a mathematical vector in the high-dimensional spaces of the expression of all genes and other molecular features. Therefore, single-cell bioinformatics, or the computational analyses of single-cell data, become the key component of all single-cell biology studies. This talk will give an overview of some key bioinformatics tasks in single-cell bioinformatics, and present examples of our on-going work on new methods for differential expression analysis and dimension reduction.