New statistical approaches to disentangle single-cell diversity - Oliver Stegle
Channel: bhadeshia123
Date: 16/04/2016

Many key biological processes are driven by differences in the regulatory landscape between single cells. Recent technical developments have enabled the transcriptomes and epigenomes of hundreds of cells to be assayed in an unbiased manner, opening up the possibility to identify and study new physiologically relevant, sub-populations of cells. In this talk I will discuss statistical advances to elucidate the factors that drive single-cell heterogeneity. Accurate and scalable latent variable models allow dissecting single-cell transcriptome and epigenome studies, thereby disentangling biological variation from technical and confounding factors. I will illustrate these approaches in applications to large datasets consisting of tens of thousands of cells and discuss their relationship to methods from population genetics.

Part of a symposium to celebrate the work of Professor Sir David MacKay FRS. The symposium was held over the period 14-15 March 2016.

http://divf.eng.cam.ac.uk/djcms2016/)