Tools to Understand the Variation Within a Cell Type Using Evolutionary Tradeoff Theory

To apply evolutionary theory, with the key insight that each cell needs to perform multiple tasks, in order to create tools to interpret the variation in molecular profiles within a cell type.

The Alon lab previously developed a theory, known as Pareto Task Inference (ParTI), that predicts that cells that need to perform multiple functions should fall in a low-dimensional polyhedron in gene-expression space, whose vertices are specialists in each task. During this project they extended the ParTI theory into two directions: evolutionary tradeoffs at the tissue level and evolutionary tradeoffs in cancer. This work is described in a preprint and the ParTI analysis code is openly available, along with a python implementation of archetypal analysis.