Understanding the Transition from Normal Melanocytes to Nevus to Melanoma (NevustoMel)

NevustoMel is an international multicentric retrospective cohort study with molecular and experimental design. It will involve the genomic characterization of cell-free DNA and affected tissues from patients. Methylomics and single-cell multi-omics will be used to identify co-existing molecular (transcriptional and epigenomic) states at single-cell level and will be generated from affected tissues. These results will be exploited using machine learning-assisted integration of multi-modal transcriptomics, epigenomics and spatial information. Integrated analyses of single-nucleus RNA sequencing from a selection of frozen tissues and spatial transcriptomics on formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded samples will allow the comparison of the findings to ground-state Human Developmental Cell Atlas data. Distinctions will be validated either with in situ hybridization (such as RNA sequencing) or immunostaining on test cohort tissues. These results will be complemented with in vitro functional analyses, high throughput sequencing and bioinformatic analyses.