Community-wide hackathons to identify central themes in single-cell multi-omics

Last year we ran an online event as part of Banff International Research Station workshops.

We designed and analysed three single cell multi-omics hackathons with another 30 participants. Our highlights and findings are highlighted in this commentary

In addition, our workshop was also featured in this article  in Nature Technology magazine.

Some of our key messages:

1. Algorithms developed for bulk multi-omics data do not address resolution, size, scale, and sparsity of single-cell multi-omics data

2. Computational benchmarks are missing because of a lack of ground truth. This hinders comprehensive assessment of new methods’ performance

3. Hackathons can identify a range of computational challenges for single-cell multi-omics and catalyze the development of unforeseen algorithmic advances

4. We analysed three single-cell multi-omics hackathons: Spatial transcriptomics, Spatial proteomics and scNMT-seq, and identified both study specific and common challenges

5. We used open frameworks to distribute the multi-omics data and share our analyses, continuous integration of changes to source codes and container snapshots for reproducible analysis.

6. Our next BIRS Banff workshop is scheduled for 06/26 to 77/01 2022, mark your calendar and reach out to us if interested! (by invitation only)

References:

Perkel JM (2021) Single-cell analysis enters the multiomics age Nature 595, 614-616

Lê Cao, KA., Abadi, A.J., Davis-Marcisak, E.F. et al. (2021) Community-wide hackathons to identify central themes in single-cell multi-omics. Genome Biol 22, 220.