Use of Single-Cell -Omic Technologies to Study the Gastrointestinal Tract and Diseases, From Single Cell Identities to Patient Features.

Single cells are the building blocks of tissue systems that determine organ phenotypes, behaviors, and functions. Understanding the differences between cell types and their activities might provide us with insights into normal tissue physiology, development of disease, and new therapeutic strategies. Although -omic level single-cell technologies are a relatively recent development that have been used only in research settings, these approaches might eventually be used in the clinic. We review the prospects of applying single-cell genome, transcriptome, epigenome, proteome, and metabolome analyses to gastroenterology and hepatology research. Combining data from multi-omic platforms coupled to rapid technological development could lead to new diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic approaches.

Quantitative assessment of cell population diversity in single-cell landscapes.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has become a powerful tool for the systematic investigation of cellular diversity. As a number of computational tools have been developed to identify and visualize cell populations within a single scRNA-seq dataset, there is a need for methods to quantitatively and statistically define proportional shifts in cell population structures across datasets, such as expansion or shrinkage or emergence or disappearance of cell populations. Here we present sc-UniFrac, a framework to statistically quantify compositional diversity in cell populations between single-cell transcriptome landscapes. sc-UniFrac enables sensitive and robust quantification in simulated and experimental datasets in terms of both population identity and quantity. We have demonstrated the utility of sc-UniFrac in multiple applications, including assessment of biological and technical replicates, classification of tissue phenotypes and regional specification, identification and definition of altered cell infiltrates in tumorigenesis, and benchmarking batch-correction tools. sc-UniFrac provides a framework for quantifying diversity or alterations in cell populations across conditions and has broad utility for gaining insight into tissue-level perturbations at the single-cell resolution.

Production of activated carbons from waste tire--process design and economical analysis.

The process design and economic analysis of process plants to produce activated carbons from waste tires and coal have been performed. The potential range of products from each process has been considered, namely for waste tire--pyro-gas, active carbon, carbon black and pyro-oil; for coal--pyro-gas and active carbons. Sensitivity analyses have been carried out on the main process factors; these are product price, production capacity, total production cost, capital investment and the tipping fee. Net present values for the two plants at various discount factors have been determined and the internal rates of return have been determined as 27.4% and 18.9% for the waste tire plant and the coal plant, respectively.