Dr Paul Angel awarded University travel grant for international meetings

Dr Paul Angel, a postdoc in the Wells Lab and Centre for Stem Cell Systems, was awarded a Travel Grant from the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience to attend the EMBO Single Cell Biology workshop in Tokyo earlier this year.

The workshop focused on single cell technologies, which are at the forefront of biological research. Single cell technologies enable researchers to better understand the properties of our cells in both health and disease states.

During the workshop, a number of emerging single cell sequencing tools were explored and the opportunities and limitations of each discussed. The workshop also provided an environment to share ideas, as well as to troubleshoot common issues such as how to annotate samples and compare cell type to cell state.

During his time in Japan, Paul also attended the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) General Meeting. The HCA aims to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease

The meeting showcased how data integration remains an important goal for the HCA and highlighted the imminent arrival of new single cell HCA datasets. The group discuss how to ‘stitch’ the cell datasets together to extract the maximum amount of information for research.

As single cell technologies and biological datasets increase, our knowledge of biology will continue to expand. Attending conferences promotes interactions between labs and brings together new interdisciplinary and international collaborations.

Isaac Virshup and Dr Jarny Choi of the Wells Lab and Centre also attended the EMBO Single Cell Biology meeting and HCA General Meeting.