Statistical Bioinformatics Webinar: Armingol -- Cell-cell Interactions and Spatial Patterns of Communication in Multicellular Organisms

Presented by Mr.  Erick Armingol (University of California, San Diego) 

Cell-cell interactions (CCIs) are crucial for multicellular life.  They shape cellular
functions which can ultimately influence organismal phenotype.  Since intercellular
interactions can be inferred from RNA-sequencing data by integrating prior knowledge
about ligand-receptor interactions, one can employ these strategies to unveil how CCIs
are associated with spatial organizations across the whole body of multicellular
organisms.  In particular, we are interested in understanding the spatial code embedded
in the molecular interactions that drive and sustain spatial organization, and the
organization that in turns drives intercellular interactions across a living animal.
Strategies for studying CCIs from gene expression will be overviewed and exemplified by
a computational strategy to inspect CCIs at the whole body of Caenorhabditis elegans
larvae.  Briefly, this strategy encompasses the inference of an overall potential of
intercellular interactions through a new Bray-Curtis-like metric, a genetic algorithm to
select the ligand-receptor pairs most informative of the spatial organization of cells
and the functional association of these molecular bases encoding spatial information.