Computational Tools and Data Visualisation for Single-Cell Multiomics

Dear Colleagues,

The recent advances in single-cell next generation sequencing have enabled the study of cellular heterogeneity across multiple tissues and organisms in an unbiased manner and at an unprecedented resolution. The established droplet-based single-cell RNA sequencing technologies (scRNA-seq) interrogate the transcriptome of several thousands of cells in parallel to estimate accurately cell type composition and highlight important transcriptional programs in health and disease. The latest developments in single-cell epigenomics in the form of single-cell Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (scATAC-seq) and other DNA sequencing platforms pave the way for deciphering the epigenetic and cis/trans gene regulation landscape that exert substantial influence on cellular identity. Taken together, single-cell multi-omics via the integration of transcriptomics and epigenomics is a powerful approach to understand complex biology and reveal the interplay of biomolecules and their functions. Despite the wide variety of methods to analyze platform-specific single-cell data, there is a pressing need for cross-platform, robust statistical tools to account for the platform-specific data properties, the inherent data sparsity and that substantial noise on high dimensional spaces.

This Special Issue welcomes submissions of original research articles, reviews and short communications focusing on single-cell multi-omics, including the application of existing methodologies to extract novel biological/clinical insights from published or unpublished datasets, as well as the development of modern computational tools and pipelines for the integrative analysis of single-cell information on any biological field.

This Special Issue aims to highlight the biological and clinical importance of integrative single-cell data analysis and its ability to generate new models and draw novel scientific conclusions. We anticipate that such approaches offer a more holistic approach in bridging the bench-to-bedside gap and improve disease prognosis, treatment and prevention.

Dr. Efthymios Motakis
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Biology is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• single-cell
• single-cell RNA-seq
• single-cell ATAC-seq
• Drop-seq
• 10x Genomics
• computational biology
• data integration
• data visualization
• multiomics