Présentation
Friday, February 15th
11:00 am – Jules Bordet meeting room, Metchnikoff building
“Deciphering gene expression programs at single-cell resolution”
SUMMARY: Single-cell technologies are revolutionising biology and provide new opportunities to trace genomic regulatory programs underlying cell fate.
In this talk I will present several computational strategies for the analysis of single-cell RNA-seq and single-cell ATAC-seq data that exploit the genomic regulatory code, to guide the identification of transcription factors and cell states. I will illustrate these methods on several model systems, including the Drosophila brain. Finally I will discuss how single-cell analyses can contribute to cross-species comparisons of regulatory programs.
BIOSKETCH: Prof. Stein Aerts has a multidisciplinary background in both bio-engineering and computer science. During his PhD he was trained in bioinformatics, and during his Postdoc he worked on the genomics of gene regulation in Drosophila. Stein now heads the Laboratory of Computational Biology at the VIB Center for Brain & Disease Research and the KU Leuven Department of Human Genetics. His lab focuses on deciphering the genomic regulatory code, using a combination of single-cell and machine-learning approaches. His most recent scientific contributions include new bioinformatics methods for the analysis of single-cell gene regulatory networks, namely SCENIC and cisTopic. Aerts co-founded the Fly Cell Atlas consortium and generated a single-cell atlas of the ageing Drosophila brain (scope.aertslab.org). Stein holds an ERC Consolidator Grant and was awarded the 2017 Prize for Bioinformatics and Computational Science from the Biotech Fund and the 2016 Astrazeneca Foundation Award Bioinformatics.