The Jigsaw Puzzle of Cellular Identity
Channel: csvconf
Date: 2023-05-31

Presented by: Kevin MacPherson

Could you tell you were looking at a picture of the Mona Lisa if someone scratched off 99% of the image before handing it to you?
Scientists who try to explore how various cell types in the body maintain their specialized identities face a similar problem. Experiments that attempt to obtain the epigenetic profile of a cell barely scratch the surface of all the information encoded within it. In isolation, these results may be uninterpretable.
Returning to the Mona Lisa example, if you took your 1% remaining image and overlaid it on top of the actual Mona Lisa, you would know instantly what the original image was. My talk would discuss how this same thing applies to the field of epigenetics and how data curation of small files can help solve this problem.