Modelling multi-cellular networks

Cells in multicellular organisms rely on thousands of different ligand-receptor pairs to coordinate the activities of multiple cell types throughout all stages of life. This thesis focuses on the development of three computational tools for analysing cell-to-cell communication networks using bulk and single-cell gene expression datasets. scMatch is able to automatically reveal the identity of each cell, NATMI helps construct the intercellular communication network among the identified cell types and HyperCommunity uses a novel mathematical model to mine the properties of the resulting communication network. Overall, this thesis provides a thorough cell-to-cell communication network analysis framework.