Genome Research' special issue covers advanced developments in single-cell genomics

Genome Research (https://genome.org) publishes a special issue highlighting novel advances and insights in Single-cell Genomics.

This special issue is Guest-Edited by Dr. Nicholas Navin, Dr. Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen, and Dr. Nancy Zhang, whose expertise across statistics, single-cell methods development, cancer biology, and computational approaches, directed the compilation of what Dr. Navin, Grady Saunders Distinguished Professor and Director of CPRIT Single Cell Genomics Center at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, describes as "animportant collection of articles and reviews, covering the latest cutting-edge developments in the field in areas such as computational methods, basic research, and biomedical applications."

Dr. Zhang, Ge Li and Ning Zhao Professor of Statistics and Vice Dean of Wharton Doctoral Programs at The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, explains that "with the rapid evolution of technology, the demand for computational tools to harness the technology and mine the complex high dimensional data sets is growing." This issue highlights research on the development of such novel computational methods for cell type identification and classification (Aevermann et al. 2021; Kimmel and Kelley 2021), single-cell epigenetics (Ohnuki et al. 2021; Ku et al. 2021), and spatial transcriptomics (Miller et al. 2021) among other areas of single-cell genomics.

Dr. Rozenblatt-Rosen, Head of Cellular and Tissue Genomics and Senior Fellow at Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, underscores the application of novel tools to a broad range of longstanding questions;"This special issue provides important insights for the community across many aspects of the single-cell genomics field, including how advances in technology and computation have driven impactful scientific discoveries in numerous areas of biology." Examples in the application of such advances applied to decipher biological function are also featured (Wang et al. 2021b; Xu et al. 2021), as well as single-cell reference atlases, which are community resources expected to be useful in future population-wide studies of disease (Nieto et al. 2021). "Single-cell genomics has given us a novel lens for better understanding health and disease," Rozenblatt-Rosen further emphasizes.

In addition to original research, four Perspective review articles provide insights into the past, present, and future of the field, including the use of transposase to develop single-cell genomics approaches (Adey 2021), computational approaches to study spatial transcriptomics (Dries et al. 2021), cancer cell states in tumors and properties of cancer phenotypes (Barkley et al. 2021), and the application of single-cell genomic methods to study common diseases and population-level variation (Auerbach et al. 2021). Dr. Zhang summarizes, "Thus, this special issue is giving a perspective of this dynamic field at the crossroads of single-cell technology development and high-throughput application to gain deeper understanding of biology and disease".