About CREiGS

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The sensitivity and availability of omic technologies has enabled the transcriptomic and epigenetic characterization of disease phenotypes. For a long while, this omic-level characterization was only possible in ‘bulk’ samples, where the measured gene-expression represented an average across the entire sample. The recent advent of single cell omic technologies, such as single cell RNA-seq(scRNA), and scATAC-seq (scATAC) have enabled the characterization of transcriptomic and epigenetic states of thousands of individual cells within human and animal tissues.

As with any new technology, the transition from discovery to clinical adoption can be slow, particularly if the biomedical workforce does not have the knowledge/skills/experience to apply new technologies to solve specific biomedical problems. To ensure the American biomedical workforce has the skills to work with single-cell technologies, there is a need for funded training initiatives to upskill the American biomedical workforce and bridge this knowledge gap. This will facilitate the translation of single-cell technologies to clinical implementation and maintain the US lead in this sector.

In response, the Clinical Research Education in Genome Science (CREiGS) Short Course, an NHGRI-funded hybrid training initiative that has already trained 200+ medical/doctoral students, postdocs, and faculty from 60+ academic institutions nationwide, will build upon its success to date to educate the biomedical research workforce in genomic medicine to facilitate clinical adoption of discoveries found using single-cell technologies. More specifically, CREiGS participants will gain a solid understanding of the methodological considerations related to the analysis of single-cell RNA seq (scRNA-seq) data, with strong emphasis on the mathematical underpinnings of commonly applied statistical and dimension reduction methods (e.g. zero-inflated modelling, principal components analysis, and Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP). Additionally, given career development is central to the mission of CREiGS, participants will also gain extensive exposure to publicly available scRNA-seq datasets and resources, providing guidance on how to best utilize these resources to develop novel questions and explore potential solutions to current genomic challenges.

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