Systems Biology Group Meeting

Lab meeting will take place on
Monday, November 9, 2020
10:00am 


Presenter: Mariano Gabitto, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Systems Biology Group, CCB

Chromatin Dynamics throughout Development: A view from the cortex

Interneurons within the mature cortex are remarkably diverse in their morphology, connectivity, and transcriptional signatures. How developmental changes in chromatin structure contribute to the emergence of distinct interneuron subtypes is unknown. In recent years, single-cell ATAC-seq has become the leading assay for probing the chromatin regulatory landscape. How do we discover structure in this high-dimensional data and use it to understand interneuron development? During this talk I will describe Bayesian state-space models to characterize chromatin information and use this model to characterize the chromatin developmental landscape of cortical Interneurons. By focusing on the parvalbumin (PV)- and somatostatin (SST)-positive populations, which comprise the two largest cardinal classes of interneurons, I identify three epochs during which chromatin is refined. After identifying enriched transcriptional regulators at different epochs, I harness transcriptional and chromatin information to calculate cell type-specific gene regulatory networks. The remodeling of gene regulatory networks during development echoes chromatin remodeling at different epochs.