Single cell transcriptomics unravels cellular heterogeneity in hepatocytes

Supervisors: Dr. Celia Martinez-Jimenez & Dr. Maria Colomé-Tatché

Enrolled from 2019 - 2024

I am a PhD student working on a shared project between Dr. Celia P Martinez-Jimenez (HPC) and Dr. Maria Colomé-Tatché (ICB), where I am involved in disentangling the effects of aging on liver tissue at single cell resolution.  I come from a background in biology, where my focus was driven to the analysis of genetic and epigenetic data. My work focusses on the transfer of experimental data from the laboratory to meaningful computational results. In more detail, the project aims to visualize and understand how aging affects the transcriptional as well as the epigenetic landscape of a cell. To that end, I am investigating different aspects in aging liver cells that potentially lead to changes on the transcriptional and regulatory level, including perturbations in aging-related pathways in aging liver.

In my shared project, I will develop and apply computational methods in order to integrate different genomic data, and to be able to gain a deeper understanding of genetic and epigenetic regulation specifically in aging cells.

Awards

  • DP AGE-REG Travel Grant - FEBS “Aging and Regeneration” Conference

Current Position

Post-Doctoral Researcher with Helmholtz Munich - Munich, Germany

Team: Institute of Stem Cell Research

Team Leader: Prof. Dr. Magdalena Götz

Publications

  • Ramakrishnan (2022) epiAneufinder: identifying copy number variations from single-cell ATAC-seq data. bioRxiv.
  • Sanchez-Quant (2022) Single-cell metabolic profiling reveals subgroups of primary human hepatocytes showing heterogeneous responses to drug challenge. bioRxiv.
  • Richter ML (2021) Single-nucleus RNA-seq2 reveals functional crosstalk between liver zonation and ploidy. Nat Commun 12, 4264.
  • Danese A (2021) EpiScanpy: integrated single-cell epigenomic analysis. Nat Commun12, 5228.