A six-month staff exchange, funded by ELIXIR, has been successful in building capacity for single-cell analysis in ELIXIR’s Czech Node. Pavel Ostasov, a postdoc from Charles University in the Czech Republic, travelling to Imperial College London (ICL) in the UK to learn hands-on techniques for single-cell analysis. The techniques have many clinical applications, including studying the genetic evolution of cancer.
Pavel returned to the Czech Republic and was able to use his knowledge to train Czech Republic researchers. A Summer School of Single Cell, with local and international participants and lecturers, was held at the Charles University, and the results of the work at ICL were published in Frontiers in Oncology.
The impact of the project has been far-reaching, with joint proposals for national and international single-cell projects already in preparation. A network of researchers from Czech universities can now run and analyse single-cell experiments to help understand cancer. The project has also enabled knowledge exchange among researchers throughout ELIXIR as part of the new Single-Cell Omics Community.
The staff exchange is an important milestone in building ELIXIR capacity in single-cell omics, which has many potential applications in the field of cancer research and beyond.