Deciphering cell states and genealogies of human haematopoiesis.

The human blood system is maintained through the differentiation and massive amplification of a limited number of long-lived haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Perturbations to this process underlie diverse diseases, but the clonal contributions to human haematopoiesis and how this changes with age remain incompletely understood. Although recent insights have emerged from barcoding studies in model systems, simultaneous detection of cell states and phylogenies from natural barcodes in humans remains challenging.

Variant to function mapping at single-cell resolution through network propagation.

Genome-wide association studies in combination with single-cell genomic atlases can provide insights into the mechanisms of disease-causal genetic variation. However, identification of disease-relevant or trait-relevant cell types, states and trajectories is often hampered by sparsity and noise, particularly in the analysis of single-cell epigenomic data. To overcome these challenges, we present SCAVENGE, a computational algorithm that uses network propagation to map causal variants to their relevant cellular context at single-cell resolution.

Patchwork Cancer Predisposition.

Inherited genetic variation is increasingly identified as an important predisposing factor to a variety of cancers. In this issue of Cancer Discovery, Pareja and colleagues developed a method of reliably detecting mosaic cancer susceptibility mutations in patients who have been sequenced as part of the MSK-IMPACT tumor profiling platform. This led to the identification of a number of mosaic mutations in cancer susceptibility alleles that are generally found in the germline, suggesting that many predisposition variants may be missed through conventional testing.