Distinguished Speaker Series: Mapping paths of tumor evolution with single cell phylogenetics

Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics & the Koret-Berkeley-TAU Initiative

Special Seminar:

Prof. Nir Yosef

Department of Systems Immunology, Weizmann Institute of Science, and Department of electrical engineering & Computer Science, UC Berkeley

"Mapping paths of tumor evolution with single cell phylogenetics"

Wednesday, April 6 2022, at 11:15

(Refreshments from 11:00)

Room 420, Check Point building, School of Computer Science, TAU

Abstract: 
Single-cell genomics provides a powerful set of tools for dissecting temporal processes such as cell differentiation and tumor development from snapshots of asynchronous ensembles of cells. A promising addition to this set of technologies utilizes Cas9- induced mutations as a way of recording lineage information in each cell, thus providing a way to infer the tree (phylogeny) by which individual cells are related. In this talk, I will describe our work on analytical tools for inference of such lineage trees and their joint analysis with the cells’ transcriptomes. I will demonstrate the utility of these tools and the Cas9 lineage tracing system for studying the Kras;Trp53 (KP) mouse model of lung adenocarcinoma, in which progenies of single transformed cells are traced up to the stage of aggressive and metastatic tumors. We will consider different ways by which a concomitant view of cell lineage trees and transcriptomes can be used to shed new light on the trajectories of cell states that are traversed during tumor development, the dynamics and regulation of sub-clonal selection and expansion, and the origins of metastases. 

Host: Prof. Ron Shamir, School of Computer Science