Seminar Prof Stein Aerts

30
Apr
11:00 - 12:30
Location

Jozef Schell seminar room

''Single-cell driven enhancer modelling and design''

The combination of scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq allows building gene-regulatory atlases of any tissue and species. I will present several new computational strategies that exploit single-cell multi-omics data: (1) to model genomic enhancers using topic modelling and convolutional neural networks; and (2) to derive “enhancer-GRNs” (eGRN) with key transcription factors, genomic enhancers, and predicted target genes per cell type. I will discuss the results of several case studies where we applied these strategies, including the Drosophila brain, human melanoma, the mouse liver, and the evolution of cell types in the vertebrate telencephalon. Finally, I will discuss how enhancer models based on deep learning can be exploited to design synthetic enhancers for Drosophila and human cell types.

Invited by Prof Yves Van de Peer, Prof Dr Em Dirk Inzé and Prof Bart Lambrecht