Associate Professor Merja Heinäniemi and her research group in the Institute of Biomedicine at the University of Eastern Finland secured funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative seeking to develop computational tools for a Human Cell Atlas. Senior Researcher Ville Hautamäki from the UEF School of Computing is also a partner in the project. All in all, 85 new projects secured funding to contribute to the Human Cell Atlas.
The goal of the Human Cell Atlas project is to create a shared, open reference atlas of all cells in the healthy human body as a resource for studies of health and disease. The funded projects seek to develop new methods for studying these datasets, and researchers will work together and share progress with each other to evaluate the strengths of different approaches.
Single-cell transcriptomics offers a tool to study the diversity of cell phenotypes through snapshots of mRNA abundances in individual cells. Heinäniemi and her research group seek to develop methods that make use of the deep learning framework for cell phenotype analysis. The objective is, on one hand, to connect the single cell observations to the tissue expression pattern, and secondly to develop approaches to remedy technical noise observed in single cell measurements. The new generative neural network models will support the Human Cell Atlas by making available analysis tools for characterizing cell phenotypes at system-level.
For further information, please contact:
Associate Professor Merja Heinäniemi, merja.heinaniemi (a) uef.fi, tel. +358 40 35 53842