About the Talk

Presenter

Dr. Ömer Ali Bayraktar

Dr. Bayraktar did his postdoc with David Rowitch at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Cambridge as a Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellow. During his postdoc, Dr. Bayraktar developed a large-scale spatial transcriptomic pipeline to map single cell gene expression and neural subtypes in situ. Using this approach, he discovered the heterogeneity of astroglial cells across the layers and areas of the mammalian cerebral cortex. He identified that astrocyte layer patterns diverge from classical neuronal laminae, revealing the complex neuroglial architecture of the cerebral cortex.

Dr. Bayraktar did his PhD with Chris Doe at HHMI to understand the developmental specification of neural diversity using Drosophila. He characterized a new neural stem cell model in the fruit fly brain that shares similarities with human neural stem cells. He discovered that multiple temporal patterning programs act in a combinatorial fashion to expand the neural diversity output of transit-amplifying progenitors.

He is now a group leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. His research aims to explore human brain cellular diversity using large-scale approaches, harnessing spatial transcriptomics, imaging, and functional screening to study neural diversity in health and disease.

Abstract

Spatial transcriptomic technologies promise to resolve cellular wiring diagrams of tissues in health and disease, but comprehensive mapping of cell types in situ remains a challenge. First, I will present cell2location, a principled Bayesian model that can resolve fine-grained cell types in spatial transcriptomic data and create comprehensive cellular maps of diverse tissues. Second, I will present GBM-space, our new effort to discover tumour tissue architecture in glioblastoma using multi-modal genomics. We discover a striking spatial organisation of GBMs, where malignant cell states regionally segregate and associate with distinct tumour microenvironment cells.

Date: June 21st, 2023 — 18:00 (GMT+3)

Language: English