WANGLAB

4. System-level study of cell state specification, cell fate decision and cell type conversion. We are interested in uncovering key regulators that decide cell state, cell type and conversion between cell types. We have developed various systems biology methods to model the epigenetic landscape of cell states and identify key regulators of specific cell state/type. Recently, we developed Taiji, a method that integrates DNA motif, gene expression, and epigenomic data, to construct genetic networks in individual samples (Zhang et al., Science Advances, 2019). Based on the genetic network, the global importance of each gene is assessed by Personalized PageRank algorithm weighted by gene expression and regulatory strength. Analysis of the key regulators in various tissues and different time stages reveal the transcriptional waves in tissue specification during mouse embryonic development. An intriguing observation is that there is no TF activated in specific time stage across all tissues,..

Primary location: La Jolla United States