The various aspects of multi-omics studies: From web design to geometry - HDR - Dr Bécavin

Thanks for clicking! This is my oral presentation for the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches. A french diploma mandatory to advise PhD students. I hope you will find some valuable information for your own multi-omic analysis. Here is the abstract of the presentation: DNA is transcribed, RNA is translated, proteins are produced — but this linear view has long been surpassed. A multiomics study is precisely the attempt to embrace this complexity: it means producing data simultaneously across multiple biological scales, building hybrid databases that connect them, developing statistical tools to integrate them, and designing interfaces that make them navigable. It is not a single method but a full scientific posture — one that spans wet lab design, data engineering, mathematics, and bioinformatics. In this HDR oral presentation, I will present 15 years of research projects, each illustrating a different dimension of multiomics — from chromatin biophysics and dimensionality reduction, to the reconstruction of a complete multi-omic portrait of Listeria, to single-cell data integration for lung cellular atlases. Each confronted a different side of the same core challenge. I will close by turning to the future — the next ten years of my research, organized around three workpackages that converge on a single ambitious goal: the reconstruction of an AI Virtual Cell integrating the full complexity of living systems. The question remains the same one that has run through all my work: how do we achieve a full multiomic reconstruction of an organism, when no single scale tells the whole story?