Single-cell omics focus group

The recent advent of high-throughput single-cell sequencing such as scRNA-seq allowed breakthroughs in many fields (e.g., immuno-oncology) but also raised significant computational and analytical challenge. A flurry of methods covering aspects as diverse as quality control, normalization clustering, dimensionality reduction, batch-effect removal, cell-type annotation, differential analysis or trajectory inference, are available and new ones are published very week. And new assays are still emerging nowadays (multi-omics, immune receptor profiling, spatial transcriptomics), coming along with new challenges.

Launched in November 2022, the group is extending the AGORA Single-Cell Omics group established by SIB Group Leader Santiago Carmona and organizes hybrid meetings every first Wednesday of the month. The group aims at discussing various topics connected to single-cell data analysis and visualization, with a focus on practical (“hands-on”) problems and new methods, benchmarks, or technologies. In 30-minutes presentations, members usually present their ongoing work, but also discuss recent articles or preprints. The presentations aim at staying informal and are followed by a discussion.

Only a couple of months after its launch, the group already has 109 members registered to the dedicated Slack channel, and meetings regularly bring together about 20 in-person attendees and 10-20 remote attendees, mostly from the SIB communities in Lausanne, Geneva, Basel, Zurich, Bern, and the local community at the AGORA Cancer Research Center in Lausanne.