How exponentials on top of exponentials in single-cell analysis is transforming biology today

It’s been a long road to mastering the cell, but biological scientists think they are getting closer and closer to understanding the fundamental mechanics of the kernels of life that make up our bodies. Decades after the sequencing of the first human genome, we now have a much more comprehensive understanding of how to discover a cell’s functions — and increasingly, the tools to actually analyze and prove that our models and theories about them are correct. That’s been the domain of single-cell analysis and a novel technique in genetic science, which has been dubbed “perturbation biology”: making extremely small changes to the genetic code inside of cells and then observing how that cell’s functions change. What began with 18 cells and limited observational data in a single lab has now grown exponentially to hundreds of thousands of cells and millions of observations globally. That massive increase in data has forced the creation of a whole new set of analytical tools to process this data and derive foundational insights into the workings of cells. How do all of these new laboratory experiments work and what kind of software tools are needed to progress the most advanced theories today? Joining host Danny Crichton on “Securities” this episode is Rahul Satija, an associate professor at New York University and a core member of the New York Genome Center as well as Lux’s own Shaq Vayda. We’ll talk about how biological tools like CRISPR power perturbation bio, why scientists are increasingly moving away from indirect experiments to direct experiments and what that means for the future of the field, how we comprehend cell heterogeneity, if we’re getting closer to “fundamental truth” in biology, and finally, why theoretical molecular scientists are increasingly going to need large-scale clinical trials for the next-generation of health treatments.