Mapping Single Cells: A Geometric Approach

High dimensional single cell technologies are on the rise, rapidly increasing in accuracy and throughput. These offer computational biology both a challenge and an opportunity. One of the big challenges with this data-type is to understand regions of density in this multi-dimensional space, given millions of noisy measurements. Underlying many of our approaches is mapping this high-dimensional geometry into a nearest neighbor graph and characterization single cell behavior using this graph structure. We will discuss a number of approaches (1) An algorithm that harnesses the nearest neighbor graph to order cells according to their developmental maturity and its use to identify novel progenitor B-cell sub-populations. (2) Using reweighted density estimation to characterize cellular signal processing in T-cell activation. (2) New clustering and dimensionality reduction approaches to map heterogeneity between cells; with an application to characterizing tumor heterogeneity in Acute Myeloid Leukemia.

发言人详细信息

Dana Pe’er is an associate professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computer Science. Her lab endeavors to understand the organization, function, and evolution of molecular networks, particularly how variation in DNA sequence alters regulatory networks and leads to the vivid phenotypic diversity of life. Her team develops computational methods that integrate diverse high-throughput data to provide a holistic, systems-level view of molecular networks. She is particularly interested in exploring how systems biology can be used to personalize care for people with cancer. By developing models that can predict how individual tumors will respond to certain drugs and drug combinations, her goal is to develop ways to determine the best drug regime for each patient. Her interest is not only in understanding which molecular components go wrong in cancer cells, but also in using this information to improve cancer therapeutics. Dr. Pe’er is the recipient of the 2014 Overton Prize, and has been recognized with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award, an NIH Directors New Innovator Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and a Stand Up To Cancer Innovative Research Grant. She was also named a Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering.

日期：
演讲者：
Dana Pe’er
所属机构：
Columbia University