Fuchou Tang from the Biomedical Pioneering Innovation Center in Peking University, China, spoke at London Calling 2023 about “scNanoATAC-seq: a long-read single-cell assay to simultaneously detect chromatin accessibility and genetic variants.” Tang spoke about developing single-cell genomics tools as a postdoctoral researcher. Then, in 2013, they developed individual cell methylation tools. Tang and team continued developing powerful techniques to learn about transcriptomics at the single-cell level. The Tang lab is now able to perform human genome de novo assembly from single-cells. Tang helped develop ATAC-seq using the ONT platform. To do so, long reads are used to identify open chromatin regions and the footprint of transcriptional factors. They have applied the method to different cell types and even cell mixtures to determine cell types. The scNanoATAC-seq method has been successfully used to discriminate epithelial and cancer cell profiles. Tang explained that their method allows the determination of allele-specific features. The example they described was one in which paternal and maternal alleles could be differentiated based on open and closed chromatin features. They can also detect single-cell genome differences. Even though I may not use this technique in the near future, I am intrigued by its possible applications and how difficult it would be to try this method.
