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Singling out blood development

Nature Biotechnology volume 33, pages 260–261 (2015)Cite this article

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Analysis of gene expression in thousands of single cells generates a model of the blood regulatory network.

The more we learn about the intricacies of embryonic development, the more it seems that populations of apparently similar cells are in fact heterogeneous, with individual cells developing at different rates than their neighbors. Efforts to measure these differences have been hampered by technological limitations, and most studies of transcription in embryos have been carried out on pools of cells, making it difficult to tease apart the gene regulatory networks that control developmental processes. In this issue, Moignard et al.1 describe an approach for inferring the regulatory interactions of blood development by assessing gene expression in thousands of single cells and computationally reducing these multidimensional datasets to direct interactions between genes. This powerful analysis not only provides a global glimpse of blood development but may serve as a blueprint for future modeling studies based on single-cell data.

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Figure 1: A novel workflow to identify regulatory interactions between genes during a developmental time course based on single-cell analysis.

Katie Vicari/Nature Publishing Group

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eva M. Fast and Len I. Zon are in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Eva M Fast & Len I Zon

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  1. Eva M Fast
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  2. Len I Zon
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Correspondence to Len I Zon.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Fast, E., Zon, L. Singling out blood development. Nat Biotechnol 33, 260–261 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3168

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