Single-cell RNA-sequencing Technique Help Recover Lost Information

 

Tablo reader up chevron

Single-cell RNA-sequencing Technique Help Recover Lost Information

Sequencing RNA from single cell can reveal a lot of information about cells in body. Researchers from MIT have gained progress from each of those cells, by modifying the commonly used Seq-Well technique.

By this new approach, the researchers could extract 10 times as much information from each cell in a sample. This increase should enable scientists to learn much more about the genes that are expressed in each cell, and help them to discover subtle but critical differences between healthy and dysfunctional cells.

“It’s become clear that these technologies have transformative potential for understanding complex biological systems. If we look across a range of different datasets, we can really understand the landscape of health and disease, and that can give us information as to what therapeutic strategies we might employ,” says Alex K. Shalek, an associate professor of chemistry, a core member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), and an extramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. He is also a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and an institute member of the Broad Institute.

In a study appearing this week in Immunity, the research team demonstrated the power of this technique by analyzing approximately 40,000 cells from patients with five different skin diseases. Their analysis of immune cells and other cell types revealed many differences between the five diseases, as well as some common features.

“This is by no means an exhaustive compendium, but it’s a first step toward understanding the spectrum of inflammatory phenotypes, not just within immune cells, but also within other skin cell types,” says Travis Hughes, an MD/PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology and one of the lead authors of the paper.

Shalek and J. Christopher Love, the Raymond A. and Helen E. St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering and a member of the Koch Institute and Ragon Institute, are the senior authors of the study. MIT graduate student Marc Wadsworth and former postdoc Todd Gierahn are co-lead authors of the paper with Hughes.

CD Genomics provides robust transcriptome research service down to single-cell input levels in high-quality samples. These global gene expression patterns in single cells already have dramatically advanced cell biology. CD genomics offers best-in-class tools for library preparation and sequencing from a single cell, a few cells, and ultra-low inputs of RNA. Combining the robust cDNA synthesis technology with Illumina next-generation sequencing and analysis technologies, the company offers reliable data of the highest quality to study cell-to-cell transcriptome heterogeneity.

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...
~

You might like savage's other books...