Bioinformatics Seminar
Time: 11AM
Venue: Davis Auditorium and Online
18 June 2024
This is a WEHI only event.Exploring mammary gland developmental stages and breast cancer heterogeneity using single-cell technologies
Jinming ChengWEHI Bioinformatics
Breast cancer is the most common cancer and the leading cause of cancer mortality in women worldwide. Clinical classification distinguishes invasive breast cancer into ER+, HER2+ and triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). Histological classification distinguishes invasive breast cancer into two major types: invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) and invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC). IDC is the most common type of invasive breast cancer comprising 60-75%, and ILC is the second most common type comprising 10-15% and is mostly ER+. Exploring the heterogeneity of breast cancer tumor cells as well as the stromal and immune microenvironment is a key step to understand breast cancer genesis and development mechanisms. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies have been rapidly developed and widely used to investigate cell type composition and identify new cell populations. Spatial transcriptomics adds an additional spatial information layer to scRNA-seq, enabling the investigation of interactions between tumor and its microenvironment. During his PhD, Jinming focused on investigating breast cancer development and heterogeneity using scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics. In this talk, he will present three projects: (1) comparing human lobular cancer and ER+ ductal cancer using scRNA-seq, (2) exploring mouse mammary gland fibroblast development using scRNA-seq, and (3) comparing different cell type annotation methods for imaging-based spatial transcriptomics data of HER2+ breast cancer. In addition, he developed an R package called scTernary and a pseudotime-course workflow that have been applied to the scRNA-seq data analysis of breast cancer and normal mammary gland.