Trajectory inference of breast differentiation from single-cell RNA sequencing data

SENRA, DANIELA; GUISONI, NARA; DIAMBRA, LUIS

Congreso; 2nd Women in Bioinformatics & Data Science LA Conference; 2021

There is evidence of a hierarchical organization in the adult mammary epithelium where stem cells give rise to luminal and basal myoepitelial cell types. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has vastly broadened the horizons for understanding cellular differentiation. Stem cells identification is typically done using known stemness markers, which in sc-RNAseq technology are not always reliable due to dropout. In this work we propose a new computational methodology based on Protein-Protein Interaction Networks (PPIN) to identify stem/progenitor cells in human breast cells. We inferred the differentiation process using these cells as the origin of the trajectory to compute the pseudotime with the diffusion maps technique.