B cells are like key ‘defenders’ in a soccer match. They play a critical role in supporting T cells, the ‘strikers’, in their battle against diseases, by producing antibodies to block specific antigens. Yet there are different types of defenders. Some form the memory that remembers the same pathogen for […]
Cells don’t function independently. They belong to a complex and interconnected network. This makes gene expression profiling of individual cells not enough for understanding their activities and crosstalk in the tissue context. Like a marriage between imaging and RNA sequencing, Spatial Transcriptomics is a revolutionized method to map gene activity […]
Take a non-small cell lung tumor. What do we see? To answer this challenging question, a lot of single-cell omics experiments have been conducted, yielding significant insights into the heterogeneity of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) microenvironment. While each successfully characterizes a facet of this ecosystem, until now no work […]
A box and whisker plot, or just box plot, is a graph that visualizes how spread-out a dataset is. A box plot displays 5 values: minimum, first quartile, median, third quartile, and maximum. How to read a box plot: The box is drawn from the first quartile to the third […]
Highlights: In every biology textbook, expression of the B cell receptor (BCR) defines B cells, and the T cell receptor (TCR) defines T cells. However, in 2019, Ahmed et al. discovered a strange cell population in Type I Diabetes that coexpresses the BCR and TCR, and key lineage markers of […]
BIRC5, known as Survivin, is one member of the Inhibitor of apoptosis protein family and plays an important role in preventing cell death (Jaiswal et al., 2015) and poor survival in cancers (Supplementary). For this reason, BIRC5 can be hypothesized to be associated with tumor resistance to cancer treatments. With […]
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) happens when the myeloid precursor cells in the bone marrow grow abnormally (making up myeloblasts). A common treatment for AML is Venetoclax. This drug inhibits BCL2, an oncoprotein that prevents cell death and is often overexpressed in the majority of blasts from AML patients (Bensi et […]
Single-cell data sets are exploding in size. From a few thousand cells, we now see more than 1 million data points being generated (Cao et. al., 2019). Large single-cell atlases are valuable resources for exploration and insights, but also pose a great challenge to anyone who wants to view and […]
“How to extract the biology behind this huge matrix of thousands of rows and columns?” Large numbers of data points hold valuable biological stories yet are tricky to graph and analyze. Imagine you had the data for 1000 features and observations, your mind would be full of questions, wondering how […]
Cancer treatment, as challenging as it sounds, has been revolutionized by recent advances in immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapies, which use monoclonal antibodies (mAb) to block the suppressive immune checkpoints, helping the patient’s immune system to kill cancer cells. However, despite several clinical case studies of success, some patients still […]
Nominated as Method of the year by Nature in 2019, single-cell multimodal omics has enabled scientists to uncover many facets of the cells by simultaneously measuring multiple modalities in one single-cell experiment. One candidate for multimodal analysis is CITE-Seq, a technique that layers cell surface protein information on top of […]
A machine learning model for cell type classification? When analyzing single-cell transcriptomic data, scientists often perform cell type annotations by checking individual marker genes. However, marker genes are not even consistent among different literature sources. Six months ago, armed with the largest curated single-cell transcriptomic data, BioTuring single-cell team naively […]
