Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2015 May 21;58(4):598-609.
doi: 10.1016/j.molcel.2015.05.005.

Advances and applications of single-cell sequencing technologies

Affiliations
Review

Advances and applications of single-cell sequencing technologies

Yong Wang et al. Mol Cell. .

Abstract

Single-cell sequencing (SCS) has emerged as a powerful new set of technologies for studying rare cells and delineating complex populations. Over the past 5 years, SCS methods for DNA and RNA have had a broad impact on many diverse fields of biology, including microbiology, neurobiology, development, tissue mosaicism, immunology, and cancer research. In this review, we will discuss SCS technologies and applications, as well as translational applications in the clinic.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Timeline of Milestones in Single Cell Sequencing
(A) Timeline of SCS Milestones (B) Histogram of the growing number of publications in SCS over the past 5 years (C) Prevalence of publications categorized by fields.
Figure 2
Figure 2. WGA and WTA Methods for Single Cell Sequencing
(A–B) Whole-genome-amplification methods. (C-D) Whole-transcriptome-amplification methods. (A) Degenerative-Oligonucleotide-Primer PCR (B) Multiple-displacementamplification. (C) oligo dT-Anchor Approach (D) Template switching
Figure 3
Figure 3. Broad Applications of SCS in Biological and Biomedical Research
Panels illustrating the diverse fields of biology that have been impacted by SCS technologies over the past 5 years. Image credits: neurobiology, Zeynep Saygin (Cell Picture Show); germline transmission, Wang and Navin; organogenesis, Mikael Häggström (Wikimedia Commons); cancer biology, NIH; clinical diagnostics, Wang and Navin; immunology, Olivier Schwartz and the Electron Microscopy Core Facility, Institut Pasteur (Cell Picture Show); microbiology, NIAID; tissue mosaicism, Wang and Navin; embryology, Seth Ruffins, Russell Jacobs, and the Caltech MRI Atlas of Mouse Development (Cell Picture Show); prenatal genetic diagnosis, Shutterstock. All images used with permission.

References

    1. Aceto N, Bardia A, Miyamoto DT, Donaldson MC, Wittner BS, Spencer JA, Yu M, Pely A, Engstrom A, Zhu H, et al. Circulating tumor cell clusters are oligoclonal precursors of breast cancer metastasis. Cell. 2014;158:1110–1122. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Adams DL, Martin SS, Alpaugh RK, Charpentier M, Tsai S, Bergan RC, Ogden IM, Catalona W, Chumsri S, Tang CM, et al. Circulating giant macrophages as a potential biomarker of solid tumors. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014;111:3514–3519. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Altomare L, Borgatti M, Medoro G, Manaresi N, Tartagni M, Guerrieri R, Gambari R. Levitation and movement of human tumor cells using a printed circuit board device based on software-controlled dielectrophoresis. Biotechnology and bioengineering. 2003;82:474–479. - PubMed
    1. Bankevich A, Nurk S, Antipov D, Gurevich AA, Dvorkin M, Kulikov AS, Lesin VM, Nikolenko SI, Pham S, Prjibelski AD, et al. SPAdes: a new genome assembly algorithm and its applications to single-cell sequencing. Journal of computational biology : a journal of computational molecular cell biology. 2012;19:455–477. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Baslan T, Kendall J, Rodgers L, Cox H, Riggs M, Stepansky A, Troge J, Ravi K, Esposito D, Lakshmi B, et al. Genome-wide copy number analysis of single cells. Nat Protoc. 2012;7:1024–1041. - PMC - PubMed

Publication types