Cell-cell interactions and communication
In multicellular organisms, high-order organizations of cells are defined by their cell-cell interactions (CCIs). Cells constantly sense their microenvironment and can trigger intracellular changes depending on the information that they receive. These communicatory processes allow single cells to coordinate their gene expression, which further enables the coordination of a collective behavior of cells. Thus, functions and phenotypes of multicellular organizations are orchestrated by their CCIs. The main focus of my research is on generating novel approaches to infer CCIs to help decipher how phenotypes are associated and how they depend on these processes.
Particularly, I have been exploring novel approaches to infer CCIs, leading me to:
- Develop a computational suite to infer CCIs (named cell2cell)
- Evaluate how cellular organization is associated with patterns of CCIs across the whole body of an animal
- Integrate multiple datasets to assess how CCIs change across different samples, conditions and/or cellular contexts by using our novel approach based on tensor factorization (method named Tensor-cell2cell)
