Reconstructing complex lineage trees from scRNA-seq data using MERLoT

Speaker: Gonzalo Parra, PhD
https://www.embl.de/research/units/genome_biology/stegle
Postdoctoral Researcher – Statistical Genomics and Systems Genetics
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
Heidelberg– Germany

Advances in single-cell transcriptomics techniques are revolutionizing studies of cellular differentiation and heterogeneity. It has become possible to track the trajectory of thousands of genes across the cellular lineage trees that represent the temporal emergence of cell types during dynamic processes. However, reconstruction of cellular lineage trees with more than a few cell fates has proved challenging. I will talk about the MERLoT tool (https://github.com/soedinglab/merlot) that I developed during my postdoc at the group of Johannes Soeding. MERLoT is a flexible and user-friendly tool to reconstruct complex lineage trees from single-cell transcriptomics data. It can impute temporal gene expression profiles along the reconstructed tree. We show MERLoT’s capabilities on various real cases and hundreds of simulated datasets.