Single Cell Omics

Single-cell omics is a rapidly growing new field that provides many advantages over traditional ‘bulk’ tissue profiling methods, such as the ability to resolve intratissue heterogeneity in cell types, profile the disease microenvironments, and study rare subpopulations. Over the last several years, single-cell genomic and transcriptome methods have had major impact on many areas of biomedical research. In addition to single cell genomic and transcriptome method, additional omics technologies, such as chromatin profiling, DNA methylation, and proteomics, are under rapid development. Together these single cell omics technologies are becoming essential tools that are revolutionizing many diverse fields of biomedical research. However, the development of single cell omics technology requires multidisciplinary teams with expertise in bioengineering, chemistry, biomedical science, and computational biology. In addition, most single cell omics methods are difficult to perform and restricted to expert laboratories that have specialized skills and equipment. Furthermore, the resulting large-scale datasets are challenging to analyze and requires expertise in bioinformatics, computational biology, statistics, and data science. Therefore, this is a significant gap and opportunity in both technology development and dissemination. The GCC single cell omics cluster aims at leveraging the expertise at different institutions and maximize the interdisciplinary synergy of the group.