About the research

Single cell RNA-Sequencing is a technology that enables researchers to measure the transcriptional activity of individual cells for tens of thousands of cells simultaneously. This exciting technology has the potential to transform what we know about tissues, the different roles that cells play, and can deliver new insights into diseases by comparing affected and healthy cell populations. Making the most of this new resource requires the development of new bioinformatics pipelines. While current approaches have worked for cell populations in the number of few thousands the computational burden of scaling up to 100K-1M cells is considerable. We will consider in this proposal improving our current methods for scaling to this size, both improving the algorithms in terms of speed and memory usage as well as enabling researchers to tap into low-cost tiers of cloud computing necessary for moving large computations to the cloud. In addition we will construct algorithms that enable researchers to search for similar datasets, or cell types within datasets, from all publicly available datasets.

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