CellX Infrastructure Network strengthens single cell omics in Denmark and at BRIC
The Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science has granted now DKK 51 million to the ‘CellX’ project, which aims to provide researchers across Denmark with better access to the analysis of cells and tissues at single-cell level.
BRIC represents Copenhagen node for CellX and will contribute to CellX by establishing novel research infrastructure for spatial transcriptomics applying different high-resolution technologies. CellX is a collaboration of the universities of Aarhus, Odense and Copenhagen. The new core facility will be supervised by BRIC group leaders Konstantin Khodosevich and Cord Brakebusch.
Disentangling omic data in individual tissue cells
Large heterogeneity of cells in complex tissues, and most in humans, poses a tremendous challenge to biomedical science aiming to understand how tissues function in heath and disease. However, novel rapidly evolving technology, called single cell omics, allows researchers to disentangle genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic or any other omic data for every individual cell in a tissue.
"The new CellX facility in Copenhagen will allow researchers from KU to perform studies of tissue or whole organism architecture and gene expression at unprecedented resolution to unravel how tissues and organisms are built up during development and which cell types contribute to disease etiology in time and space", says group leader Konstantin Khodosevich.
Group Leader Cord Brakebusch adds:
“The facility will support researchers from all over DK aiming to address fundamental research questions, such as: How individual neurons differentiate during embryogenesis and assemble into brain neuronal networks, how immune cells communicate with their surroundings during inflammation or how cancer cells influence the tumor microenvironment and how they change their aggressiveness in a mutation-independent manner”.
The structure, and webpage, of the facility is still under development, and is expected to be up and running at BRIC this fall.