Rapid advances in single-cell genomics provide powerful new ways to dissect different layers of genomic information, giving new views of cellular identity and function at a single-cell level. This is enabling exciting new opportunities to dissect developmental and disease trajectories, cellular heterogeneity within complex tissues, cellular responses to environmental and genetic variation, and disease states.

Many of these technologies are still in flux, with very sparse data and rapidly evolving protocols, which provide many new opportunities but also challenges to develop, optimize and standardise these approaches. Many groups within Heidelberg, at the EMBL, DKFZ and University, are using these approaches to dissect different aspects of development and disease states.

The aim of the centre is to foster interactions and exchange of expertise (both experimental and computational), promote collaborations between groups at different sites, and increase the visibility of groups using single-cell sequencing approaches at the national and international level.