I'm really excited for more meta-analyses to come out of these large-scale projects. I'm even more excited for the prospect of a single cell TCGA which the Human Cell Atlas will eventually get to.
Unfortunately it seems like many papers that operate on bulk data are a large part signal deconvolution due to cell type heterogeneity as well as tumor heterogeneity. I'm looking forward to when we have single cell resolution of all the data types in this paper: mRNA, miRNA, methylation, surface markers, and CNVs (maybe one day SNPs). We'll then know things like the identity of lymphocytes and their TCR/BCRs as well as the true heterogeneity tumors. There have been a lot of cool papers that have been published just this year on subsets of this single cell data [1, 2, 3].
The Human Cell Atlas project will certainly yield a tremendous amount of data and define many new cell types. I wonder how much resolution we will get from single cell RNA-seq since technological limitations permit the analysis of genes with high expression. In my experience with single cell analysis we only detect a few thousand genes per cell and many of those are not detected frequently enough to infer their contribution to the cells identity.
It was a series of 27 co-published articles in Cell all published on April 5th. Really an amazing project, and I am immeasurably jealous my current boss is part of the consortium!
This is cool for sure, but that is a large bolus of reading to do. Maybe this is an obvious insight for his community, but the bottleneck in greater biology/medicine is quickly moving from data generation to data analysis (I guess where it has been for genomics for a quite while).
Unfortunately it seems like many papers that operate on bulk data are a large part signal deconvolution due to cell type heterogeneity as well as tumor heterogeneity. I'm looking forward to when we have single cell resolution of all the data types in this paper: mRNA, miRNA, methylation, surface markers, and CNVs (maybe one day SNPs). We'll then know things like the identity of lymphocytes and their TCR/BCRs as well as the true heterogeneity tumors. There have been a lot of cool papers that have been published just this year on subsets of this single cell data [1, 2, 3].
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0024-3
[2]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/02/221994
[3]: http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)31449-6