Abstract

Work in the Gottgens lab has recently utilised single cell expression profiling technology to study the emergence of the first wave of haematopoiesis in the developing embryo, and used the expression data from nearly 4,000 single cells to construct a transcriptional regulatory network model that captures key aspects of early blood development. In parallel work, the group has used single cell expression profiling to study the cellular heterogeneity of the adult blood stem/progenitor compartment, gaining new insights into the likely nature of long-term blood stem cells.

Taken together, this work highlights (i) that single cell genomics is a promising technology to advance our knowledge of blood cell development, and (ii) that advanced computational analysis is essential to optimise extraction of new biological knowledge from such data.