Tag Archives: genomics

New insights by single-cell genomics

Congress report Annual AGD Meeting 2018, Potsdam Oct. 5–6

Welcome and Opening of Symposium by  Peter Nürnberg, President of the AGD and Joachim L. Schultze, Chair of the Program Committee.

Joachim L. Schultze
Peter Nürnberg

The AGD meeting was interesting and a great primer for all of us who are not directly working with single cells.

Maybe it is an unusual research field – dissecting single cells in the first stage is not a trivial task. And single cell  means single cell experiment that can be replicated only in other cells. The current readout is  RNA content at a given time while genomics and proteomics still need to be integrated. Experiments cover mainly abundant RNAs and for cost reasons only the 3′ ends. The statistical analysis usually is a 2 dimensional PCA (known to overfit noise) so this not a trivial approach at all. Newly identified cell cluster need careful confirmation as addressed in the talk of Andreas Schlitzer.

Continue reading New insights by single-cell genomics

How to explain genomics to lay people

I had to give several lectures last week explaining lay people how genomic studies work. I finally decided to compare the human DNA with the bible text – not so much in the sense of Collins’ language of God but the sheer amount of information contained in a single cell.
Here is just one slide of this talk – it seems that the comparison worked quite well – in particular the fact that if you can read a text you will not necessarily understand it. Continue reading How to explain genomics to lay people