dkNET Webinar:Single Cell Multi-Omics Analysis of Beta Cell Heterogeneity & Differentiation 05172024

dkNET Webinar: Single Cell Multi-Omics Analysis of Beta Cell Heterogeneity and Differentiation

Presenter: Yan Li, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Genetics and Genomics, Case Western Reserve University

Abstract
In human tissues, not only different cell types are present in a tissue, but the same cell type from the same person may also exist in different states depending on various factors such as environment, age, or disease state. The concept of cellular heterogeneity has been actively pursued in some diseases (e.g., cancer stem cell). However, the presence and disease relevance of cellular heterogeneity in non-proliferating cell types, such as pancreatic beta cells are not well studied. We are using single cell RNA-seq, single cell ATAC-seq, Hi-C, and CRISPR technologies to investigate this interesting question. Another interest in the lab is to explore pluripotent stem cell (PSC) as a model for diabetes research and therapy. We performed the first single cell RNA-seq study to map the entire differentiation process from human ESC to the final stage, which include both endocrine and non-endocrine cell populations. This study shed light on the strategies to improve beta-cell differentiation for therapeutics. It also makes another conceptual contribution to the diabetes field that many DNA variants may cause disease risk during the development.

The top 3 key questions that the Beta Cell Hub can answer:

1. What are the cell type specific gene expression patterns within human islets?

2. What are the dynamic gene expression patterns during beta cell differentiation from embryonic stem cell?

3. scRNA, scATAC and HiC omics datasets generated from human islets relevant to Type 2 Diabetes.

Resource link: Beta Cell Hub https://hiview.case.edu/public/BetaCellHub/differentiation.php

Upcoming webinars schedule: https://dknet.org/about/webinar


Webinar host and organizer: Ko-Wei Lin, PhD. NIDDK Information Network (dkNET; https://dknet.org), info@dknet.org

Video edited by: Ko-Wei Lin