Generating an Immune Cell Atlas in Ethnically Diverse Africans

This network’s goal is to generate an African Immune Cell Atlas using single-cell RNA sequencing techniques to profile the transcriptomic and epigenetic profile of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from ethnically diverse Africans before and after immune stimulation.

This group focused on optimizing cell recovery and sample processing protocols for cells collected under challenging conditions and developing computational tools to analyze data from these samples. They developed Memento, a scalable model to correlate gene expression and technical noise, and scQuint, a splicing tool to remove technical artifacts from single-cell RNA-sequencing data. They published BABEL to translate single-cell ATAC-seq and single-cell RNA-sequencing modalities and FastGxE, a software to detect genotype-by-environment interaction effects in multi-context genomic data.