216 Community resources for discovering cell type specific functions in livestock: The pig example.

Abstract Individual cells are the fundamental units of biology. Powerful new single-cell (SC) applications are now available to understand how gene expression and regulation contributes to important agricultural traits at a cellular and molecular level. I will provide examples of the value of such data to explore pig tissues at the single cell level. However, few resources are available to best use such methods for agricultural species. There is thus an urgent need for the scientific community to collectively plan and develop the resources needed to support the integrative analysis and application of SC data for many areas of agricultural research. For example, these include domesticated animal species fields such as physiology, nutrition, immunology, reproduction, and genetics. To address this challenge for SC research in agriculture, animal and plant genomics researchers are organizing several activities intended to initiate community-based solutions to create an effective SC research infrastructure. These include: a community survey to collect data on our community needs, present a series of training and discussion sessions on-line February-March 2025, and hold an in-person Single Cell Workshop March 29-30, 2025. At the Orlando SC Workshop, the community will develop team-building relationships, discuss how to document and address the community’s needs, as well as hear from experts working with medical and agricultural SC data. The talk will provide a description of these activities, their conclusions, and solicit audience input to further address community needs.