title: Scaling single-cell genomics from phenomenology to mechanism.
abstract: Three of the most fundamental questions in biology are how individual cells differentiate to form tissues, how tissues function in a coordinated and flexible fashion and which gene regulatory mechanisms support these processes. Single-cell genomics is opening up new ways to tackle these questions by combining the comprehensive nature of genomics with the microscopic resolution that is required to describe complex multicellular systems. Initial single-cell genomic studies provided a remarkably rich phenomenology of heterogeneous cellular states, but transforming observational studies into models of dynamics and causal mechanisms in tissues poses fresh challenges and requires stronger integration of theoretical, computational and experimental frameworks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.|Department of Biological Regulation, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
authors.forename: Amos
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tanay
authors.affiliation: Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA.|Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140, USA.|Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Aviv
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Regev
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D023281:Genomics; D006801:Humans; D008957:Models, Genetic; D059010:Single-Cell Analysis / Q000379:methods*; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis