CCAIM Seminar Series – Dr. Oliver Stegle, German Cancer Research Centre + EMBL

Dr. Oliver Stegle is heading the Division of Computational Genomics and Systems Genetics at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and is a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Heidelberg. Since 2019 he has been co-directing the Health program in the European Laboratory for Learning in Intelligent Systems.

For this event, Dr. Stegle is hosted by Professor Mihaela van der Schaar of the University of Cambridge, a world authority on machine learning for medicine and Director of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine (CCAIM).

Seminar topic: From genotype to phenotype with single-cell resolution

The study of genetic effects on gene expression using bulk-RNA sequencing has en- abled the identification of quantitative trait loci (eQTL), which link inherited genetic variants to gene expression changes across different human tissues. Advances in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) provide for unprecedented opportunities to increase the resolution of eQTL mapping approaches, thereby assaying gene regulatory effects at the resolution of cell types, cell states and even individual cells contained in human tissues.

Dr. Stegle will discuss experimental strategies and analytical methods to enable the required population-scale single-cells sequencing. He will then describe applications of these approaches to perform population-scale single-cell profiling of human induced pluripotent stem cells derived from more than one hundred donors across a differentiation trajectory towards endoderm and neuronal linages.

Dr. Stegle's research develops novel approaches for mapping genetic effects in an unbiased manner across cell types and cell states using a continues framework for modelling cell state heterogeneity and genetic effects.