Dr. Jiang and co-PI Qing Zhang, PhD (Dept. of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine) received the one-year award to develop single cell -omic analysis tools.
The project is titled “Single-Cell Omics Analyses for Assessing Genomic, Transcriptomic, and Epigenomic Heterogeneity in Cancer”. The labs plan to develop methods to profile copy number aberrations and assess intratumor heterogeneity by single-cell DNA sequencing, to deconvolute bulk gene expression profiles by existing single-cell RNA sequencing datasets, and to profile epigenetic heterogeneity by single-cell chromatin accessibility analysis. They will apply methods to both bulk-tissue and single-cell cancer sequencing datasets that are either publicly available or generated through collaborations. Through this framework, the labs will be able to extract genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic signatures, which will greatly facilitate understanding of tumor progression and metastasis, aid biomarker discovery for diagnosis, and tailor personalized treatment.