Leveraging single-cell transcriptomics to understand the molecular basis for SARS-CoV-2 distribution in the population

ellis 15 April 2020 - 15 April 2020

15 April 2020 • 13:40 - 13:55

(Helmholtz Zentrum München)

Single-cell technologies nowadays give us easy and large-scale access to cell-state observations on the transcriptomic and epigenomic level. Within the Human Cell Atlas Lung Biological Network, we aim to identify the distribution of SARS-CoV-2 cell entry genes across more than 1.1M transcriptomes from 164 individuals. In particular we can link variation in age, gender and smoking status to cell-type specific expression. The underlying transcriptome networks provide hypotheses on how infection rates differ across the population and motivate targeted studies and perturbation experiments.