Community-wide hackathons to identify central themes in single-cell multi-omics

Biological systems are fundamentally multi-scale, with mostly uncharacterized molecular pathways, cellular actions, and cellular communities that collectively give rise to their function. While one high-throughput measurement technology can resolve specific biological molecules, comprehensive characterization of biological systems can only be achieved by integration of multi-modal data types across molecular, cellular, spatial, and population scales. The integration of heterogeneous and complementary assays from multi-omics can reveal interactions between modalities that drive biological systems and processes. Recent advances in single-cell multi-omics technologies provide unprecedented opportunities for such multi-scale characterization but interpreting biological processes from these data requires parallel advances in novel computational techniques.