Rackham, O.J.L. et al. Nat. Genet. 10.1038/ng.3487 (18 January 2016).

A number of differentiated cell types can be forced to change identity without going through a pluripotent state, but screening for conversion factors is usually laborious. Rackham et al. have developed Mogrify, a computational tool that analyzes expression data from cell and tissue types in the FANTOM5 project, identifying transcription factors that are differentially expressed in each cell type and that regulate differentially expressed genes in the local regulatory network. Applied to 173 human cell types, the tool suggested sets of factors that could be used to drive the transdifferentiation of any cell type into any other cell type. A number of Mogrify predictions are validated by existing transdifferentiation protocols, and the authors experimentally verified predictions for two novel conversions.