Technological advances from our groups and others towards high-throughput chromatin accessibility profiling in single cells have enabled epigenomic analyses at unprecedented resolution and scale. Towards this goal, we highlight the development of a recent single cell ATAC-seq approach and its application to investigate epigenetic changes associated with resting and stimulated human blood cells. We discuss how one can integrate genome-wide maps of chromatin accessibility with transcriptional profiles from matched contexts based on single-cell RNA-sequencing, to help determine cis-regulatory elements that potentially mediate gene expression programs, which we find to be specific to both cell type and stimuli. We also touch upon the relevance of this model and the nominated regulatory factors in the context of autoimmune disease, and our plans for future work in developing gene regulatory networks using single-cell stimulation response multi-omic data.
Dr Fabiana Duarte is a postdoc in Jason Buenrostro's lab at Harvard University working on the development of single cell epigenomics methods to investigate mechanisms of epigenetic heterogeneity in the bone marrow.
Dr Vinay Kartha is a post-doc in the Buenrostro lab working on the development and application of computational methods for integrative analyses of single-cell genomics data associated with development and disease.
