Seminar “CRISPR/Cas9-mediated clonal tracking during zebrafish embryonic development and regeneration”
Date
Thursday, 1st March 2018
Time
12:00 am
Place
University of Barcelona
Faculty of Physics Building
Room 3.20, 3rd floor
Speaker
Dr Anna Alemany, Hubrecht Institute (The Netherlands)
Abstract
Embryonic development is a crucial period in the life of multicellular organisms, when limited sets of embryonic progenitors produce all cells in the adult body. Determining which fate these progenitors acquire in adult tissues requires simultaneously measuring clonal history and cell identity at single-cell resolution, which has been a major challenge. Clonal history has traditionally been investigated by microscopically tracking cells during development, monitoring the heritable expression of genetically encoded fluorescent proteins and, more recently, utilizing next-generation sequencing technologies exploiting somatic mutations or genome editing.
On the other hand, single-cell transcriptomics provides a powerful platform for unbiased cell-type classification. In this talk, I will present ScarTrace, a single-cell sequencing strategy that allows to simultaneously quantify clonal history and cell type for thousands of cells obtained from different organs of the adult zebrafish.
Similar approaches will have major applications in other experimental systems, where matching embryonic clonal origin to adult cell-type will ultimately allow a reconstruction of how the adult body was built from a single cell. Since ScarTrace provides a glimpse of the cellular past, it will be interesting to explore how this history is predictive of the current epigenetic and expression state.
