Revealing the vectors of cellular identity with single-cell genomics
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Author(s)
Wagner, Allon
Regev, Aviv
Yosef, Nir
Date Issued
November 2016
Journal
Nature Biotechnology
Publisher
Springer Nature
Citation
Wagner, Allon, Aviv Regev, and Nir Yosef. “Revealing the Vectors of Cellular Identity with Single-Cell Genomics.” Nature Biotechnology 34, no. 11 (November 2016): 1145–1160.
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Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Single-cell genomics has now made it possible to create a comprehensive atlas of human cells. At the same time, it has reopened definitions of a cell's identity and of the ways in which identity is regulated by the cell's molecular circuitry. Emerging computational analysis methods, especially in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), have already begun to reveal, in a data-driven way, the diverse simultaneous facets of a cell's identity, from discrete cell types to continuous dynamic transitions and spatial locations. These developments will eventually allow a cell to be represented as a superposition of 'basis vectors', each determining a different (but possibly dependent) aspect of cellular organization and function. However, computational methods must also overcome considerable challenges-from handling technical noise and data scale to forming new abstractions of biology. As the scale of single-cell experiments continues to increase, new computational approaches will be essential for constructing and characterizing a reference map of cell identities.
MIT Department
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biology
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/NBT.3711
