This lecture is one of the 2024 Senior Vice Chancellor’s Research Seminar series.

Speaker

Jiebiao Wang, PhD

Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, School of Public Health

Topic

Integrating Single-Cell and Tissue Omics: Population-Level Cell Type-Specific Insights

Registration for the lecture is required to receive event instructions.

Details:

Jiebiao Wang, PhD, assistant professor of biostatistics, School of Public Health, will deliver his talk, “Integrating Single-Cell and Tissue Omics: Population-Level Cell Type-Specific Insights,” today from noon-1 p.m. via Zoom (you must register for the talk before it begins).

Bulk tissue sample omics reflect average biomolecular profiles across numerous cell types and are influenced by cellular heterogeneity. Subsequently, cellular fractions—the composition of different cells within a tissue—can confound tissue-level analyses. Estimating cellular fractions is critical to reducing confounders in these analyses and inferring cell type-specific (CTS) omics. While single-cell studies are emerging, their expense limits these studies to small sample sizes, which may not represent study populations as accurately as large-scale bulk data would.

To address these challenges, Wang and colleagues developed several statistical methods to integrate single-cell and tissue-level omics data to gain population-level CTS insights. Wang will describe their work using cell-type references from single-cell RNA sequencing and single-cell DNA methylation spanning 1.5 million cells to deconvolve more than 40 tissue types into 200 cell types. Those estimated cellular types enable many downstream CTS analyses, like differential cellular fraction analyses, sample-level CTS omics estimates, CTS differential methylation/expression analyses, CTS molecular quantitative trait loci analyses, and CTS network analyses. Wang will also demonstrate the utility of his proposed methods in identifying CTS associations in various biomedical contexts, like Alzheimer's disease, autism, schizophrenia and asthma.