TEAM LEADER: Holger Heyn (PhD, Miguel Servet Fellow)

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS: Elisabetta Mereu (PhD), Catia Moutinho (PhD, AECC), Giovanni Iacono (PhD), Gustavo Rodriguez (PhD, Juan de la Cierva)

PhD STUDENTS: Atefeh Lafzi (MSc, ITN Marie Curie), Ramon Massoni Badosa (MSc)

LAB TECHNICIAN: Giulia Lunazzi (PhD)

SUMMARY

Our understanding of the complexity of multicellular organisms dramatically changes with the advent of technologies capable to characterize individual cells one at a time. Looking at complex systems, such as tissues or organs at single-cell level is revealing cellular heterogeneity of cell types and states far bigger than had been anticipated. The Single Cell Genomics Team centers on the production and analysis of single-cell genomics data to elucidate cellular heterogeneity and related dynamics in organs and organisms, in health and disease, in humans and model systems. The mission of the group is the implementation and optimization of single-cell sequencing technologies and their application in basic and clinical research projects. We join biological, technical and computational knowledge in order to determine and apply best practices in single-cell research. Our state-of-the-art technologies and sophisticated computational pipelines position our group at the forefront of single-cell genomics research. The ERC (BCLL@las Synergy Project) and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative support our participation in the Human Cell Atlas Project, for which we are co-chairing the Standards and Technology Working Group.

Gene regulatory networks inferred from single-cell RNA sequencing data of the healthy and diseased (Type 2 diabetes) human pancreas (Iacono et al., BioRxiv 2018).

Fig. 1

Gene regulatory networks inferred from single-cell RNA sequencing data of the healthy and diseased (Type 2 diabetes) human pancreas (Iacono et al., BioRxiv 2018).

RESEARCH PROJECTS

  1. Single-cell technologies
  2. Human Cell Atlas projects
  3. Cancer heterogeneity dynamics and targeted therapy
  4. Tumor microenvironment

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Salzer M, Lafzi A, Berenguer-Llergo A, Youssif C, Castellanos A, Solanas G, Peixoto F, Stephan-Otto Attolini C, Prats N, Martín-Caballero J, Heyn H1, Aznar Benitah S1.
“Identity Noise and Adipogenic Traits Characterize Dermal Fibroblast Aging.”
Cell,175(6):1575-1590.e22, 2018.

Lafzi A, Moutinho C, Picelli S, Heyn H1.
“Experimental Design of Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Studies.”
Nature Protocols, 13(12):2742-2757, 2018.

Iacono G, Mereu M, Guillaumet-Adkins A, Corominas R, Cuscó I, Rodríguez-Esteban G, Gut M, Pérez-Jurado LA, Gut I, Heyn H1.
“bigSCale: An Analytical Framework for Big-Scale Single-Cell Data.”
Genome Research, 28(6):878-890, 2018.

Sanchez-Mut JV, Heyn H, Silva BA, Dixsaut L, Garcia-Esparcia P, Vidal E, Sayols S, Glauser L, Monteagudo-Sánchez A, Perez-Tur J, Ferrer I, Monk D, Schneider B, Esteller M, Gräff J.
“PM20D1 methylation quantitative trait locus is associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”
Nature Medicine, 24(5):598-603, 2018.

Malta TM, Sokolov A, Gentles AJ, Burzykowski T, Poisson L, Weinstein JN, Kamińska B, Huelsken J, Omberg L, Gevaert O, Colaprico A, Czerwińska P, Mazurek S, Mishra L, Heyn H, Krasnitz A, Godwin AK, Lazar AJ; Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network, Stuart JM, Hoadley KA, Laird PW, Noushmehr H, Wiznerowicz M.
“Machine Learning Identifies Stemness Features Associated with Oncogenic Dedifferentiation.”
Cell, 173(2):338-354, 2018.

* Authors contributed equally
1 Corresponding author