A brief review of single-cell transcriptomic technologies

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an effort to develop new technologies for measuring gene expression and sequence information from thousands of individual cells. Large data sets that were obtained using these 'single cell' technologies have allowed scientists to address fundamental questions in biomedicine ranging from stems cells and development to cancer and immunology. Here, we provide a brief review of recent developments in single-cell technology. Our intention is to provide a quick background for newcomers to the field as well as a deeper description of some of the leading technologies to date.

Feature Selection and Dimension Reduction for Single Cell RNA-Seq based on a Multinomial Model

“…Single cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-Seq) is a powerful tool for profiling gene expression patterns in individual cells, facilitating a variety of analyses such as identification of novel cell types [1,2]. In a typical protocol, single cells are isolated in liquid droplets and messenger RNA (mRNA) is captured from each cell, converted to cDNA by reverse transcriptase (RT), then amplified using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [3,4,5].…”

Single-cell Analysis with Microfluidic Devices

“…1A. 23 Firstly, individual cells were sorted into 96 well plates filled with PCR buffer by a flow cytometer, and dissociated by the hypotonic pressure of cell membranes from influx of fluids. Then, specific target transcript amplifications were performed by PCR use a mixture of primers for a predetermined set of genes in microfluidic chip.…”

New transcriptomic tools to understand testis development and functions

“…Thanks to microfluidic (Klein et al, 2015;Zilionis et al, 2016), droplet-based (Macosko et al, 2015) or FACS-based methods (Jaitin et al, 2014), scRNA-seq is able to capture the transcriptome of a very large number of cells. These high-throughput technologies (Ziegenhain et al, 2017) have proved very efficient for inferring and describing the temporal dynamic of cell differentiation, or the spatial description of different cell populations within an organ (Kalisky et al, 2017;Macaulay et al, 2017;Tanay and Regev, 2017;Wagner et al, 2016). In the field of reproductive biology, several single-cell transcriptomic studies have already been performed, on human PGCs/gonocytes and fetal somatic cells (Guo et al, 2015;L.…”