Seminar “RNA sequencing technologies for health and disease monitoring: single-cell patch-seq in diabetes and cell-free RNA in fetal-maternal health”
Date
Thursday, 20th of December of 2018
Time
12:00 am
Place
University of Barcelona
Faculty of Physics Building
Room 3.20, 3rd floor
Speaker
Dr Joan Camuñas, Stanford University (USA)
Abstract
In this talk I will show the application of two RNA sequencing technologies to investigate human health and disease states. First, I will present pancreas patch-seq, a new single-cell method to combine whole-cell patch-clamp and single-cell RNA sequencing in the human pancreas. Islet-cells in the pancreas regulate glucose levels in the body through insulin and glucagon secretion and their dysfunction leads to diabetes.
Although several single-cell studies have shown that pancreatic cells show heterogenous gene expression, it has remained challenging to correlate this transcriptomic heterogeneity to functional heterogeneity and to dysfunctional states in diabetes. Using patch-seq and network analysis I will show that a set of ‘hub’ genes and pathways drive functional heterogeneity in nondiabetic insulin-producing beta-cells and that certain transcriptional programs get upregulated during dysfunction early in T2D.
Next, I will show how sequencing of circulating RNA in the blood (cell-free RNA) can be use as a ‘liquid biopsy’ tool to monitor fetal and maternal health. In particular I will show that cell-free RNA can be used as a molecular clock to establish the gestational age of the fetus, and that a reduced set of genes can be used to predict preterm delivery in high-risk populations.
