A team of Yale researchers has won best performer awards in two of three contests in the “DREAM Single Cell Transcriptomics Challenge.”
In DREAM Challenges, teams of researchers from around the world propose solutions to biomedical questions in an open science effort. In the Single Cell Transcriptomics Challenge, participants had to reconstruct the location of single cells in the Drosophila embryo using single-cell transcriptomic data.
The Yale team, “Team OmicsEngineering” included researchers Ke Xu, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, and lab members Xinyu Zhang, PhD, Associate Research Scientist in Psychiatry, and Xiaoyu Liang, PhD, and Chang Shu, PhD, postdoctoral researchers. They collaborated with Ying Hu, PhD, staff scientist at the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, National Cancer Institute.
A total of 34 research teams participated in the competition.
Xu’s lab has focused on applications of computational genomics predicting clinical outcomes, and it participated in the challenge to test its predictive model using the provided single cell transcriptome data.
Xu said the lab hopes to apply its computational genomic strategies to dissect complex psychiatric disorders and to predict clinical outcomes in psychiatry.