BMC Seminar - Systems Learning of Single Cells

BioMedical Center Seminar June 2, 2025, 11:00-12:00 in Askja N132

Dr. Qing Nie, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Developmental & Cell Biology, Department of Mathematics, Department of Developmental and Cell Biology, The NSF-Simons Center for Multiscale Cell Fate Research, University of California, Irvine

Title: Systems Learning of Single Cells

Abstract: Cells make fate decisions in response to dynamic environments, and multicellular structures emerge from multiscale interplays among cells and genes in space and time. While single-cell omics data provides an unprecedented opportunity to profile cellular heterogeneity, the technology requires fixing the cells, often leading to a loss of spatiotemporal and cell interaction information. How to reconstruct temporal dynamics from single or multiple snapshots of single-cell omics data? How to recover interactions among cells, for example, cell-cell communication from single-cell gene expression data? I will present a suite of our recently developed computational methods that learn the single-cell omics data as a spatiotemporal and interactive system. Those methods are built on a strong interplay among systems biology modeling, dynamical systems approaches, machine-learning methods, and optimal transport techniques. The tools are applied to various complex biological systems in development, regeneration, and diseases to show their discovery power. Finally, I will discuss the methodology challenges in systems learning of single-cell data.