Bringing Blood Stem Cell Phenotype, Genotype, and Function Closer Together

Imperfect purity, subtypes, and retrospective functional assays compromise efforts to define the molecular identity of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). In this issue of Cell Stem Cell , Wilson et al. (2015) use a single-cell-based bioinformatics-experimental strategy to extract a consensus molecular signature from heterogeneous HSC pools. Their data and strategy provide a powerful resource for stem cell characterization.