All living organisms live in or are ecosystems of individual cells that interact and adapt to the micro- and macro-environmental changes throughout their lives. They respond to their environment by progression towards next developmental stages, by evolutionary adaptation, by malignant growth or eventually by death. The key element in these processes is the behavior of the individual cell with its means of living in one situation and to adapt to another. Causes and consequences of epigenetic changes, transcriptional profile modulation and new genetic profiles drive the single cell towards its destiny, contributing to the complexity of the multicellular organism or cell colony.
To study these units of life CNAG has successfully established robust sequencing-based processes to quantify gene expression of thousands of single cells and they continue developing new approaches for the identification of somatic alterations and chromatin states in single cells. Single cell genomics toolkits allow us to deconvolute sample and tissue heterogeneity and to track dynamic changes throughout stimulation or perturbation.