Dr. Maria Colomé-Tatché serves as Research Group Leader at Helmholtz Zentrum München's Computational Health Center within the Institute of Computational Biology (ICB), where she heads the Computational Epigenomics laboratory. Her work focuses on developing computational frameworks for single-cell epigenomic analysis to decode cellular identity mechanisms through DNA methylation and chromatin accessibility patterns. Her research centers on computational epigenomics with emphasis on single-cell bisulfite sequencing (scBS-seq) and scATAC-seq data analysis. She develops open-source tools like epiScanpy and aneufinder for dimensionality reduction, trajectory inference, and copy number variation calling. Key applications target cancer evolution, aging trajectories, and cellular reprogramming where epigenetic heterogeneity drives phenotypic outcomes. Her methodology addresses challenges in high-noise single-cell data including missing values and technical artifacts. Publications demonstrate consistent innovation in single-cell multi-omics integration, particularly advancing imputation techniques for sparse epigenetic datasets and establishing benchmarking standards for cross-platform data harmonization in epigenomic atlases. Dr. Colomé-Tatché secured Helmholtz Association funding including the "sparse2big" Incubator grant for single-cell data imputation and a project investigating pathogen adaptation through chromatin heterogeneity, enabling her team's development of computational pipelines for biomedical discovery. The Colomé-Tatché Lab maintains active collaborations across genomics consortia while advancing computational approaches to link epigenetic states with transcriptional outputs in disease models, with ongoing work focused on cancer relapse mechanisms and aging biomarkers.
