School of Biomedical Sciences cordially invites you to join the following seminar:

Speaker: Dr. Weike Pei, Assistant Professor, School of Life Sciences, Westlake University
Talk Title: Single-cell lineage tracing reveals cell fate and mammalian development in vivo

Date: 4 March 2025 (Tuesday)
Time: 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, G/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Rio Sugimura

Biography

Dr. Pei earned his Ph.D. in immunology from Heidelberg University under the mentorship of Dr. Hans-Reimer Rodewald. During his PhD, he pioneered the development of in situ barcoding systems, which enabled single-cell lineage tracing of native hematopoiesis. Afterwards, he joined Dr. Vijay Kuchroo’s lab at Harvard as a research fellow, where he focused on neuroimmunology. In 2021, Dr. Pei was honored with the CRI Eugene V. Weissman Fellow and was recognized as one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 (China). In 2022, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor at Westlake University. His research group is dedicated to advancing next-generation single-cell tracing technologies to study cell fate specification in the contexts of development, aging, and disease.

Abstract

A fundamental aim in stem cell and developmental biology is to accurately resolve the developmental history and cell fate of individual cells. To achieve this, lineage tracing has been widely employed to provide key information about the location, number and cell state of progenitor cells and their progeny by identifying all descendants originating from a single cell within tissues. However, conventional lineage tracing approaches are limited by either invasive manipulation of cells (e.g. transplantation), which may disrupt cellular physiology, or by the limited availability of fluorescent reporters, which restricts the quantitative analysis of large cell populations at single-cell resolution. The integration of cellular barcoding with single-cell genomics, also known as single-cell lineage tracing, provides a new lens to resolve cell fate and transcriptional state within the same cell. Here, we present a novel single-cell lineage tracing approach, which can simultaneously integrate cell lineage, gene expression and chromatin state in vivo. We demonstrate the ability of this new system in quantifying the temporal fate contributions of epiblasts, reconstructing spatial lineage relationships across diverse tissue regions, and providing new insights into the interplay between the transcriptome and epigenome during cell fate decisions.

ALL ARE WELCOME.