Single cell transcriptomics comes of age

Abstract

Single cell transcriptomics technologies have vast potential in advancing our understanding of biology and disease. Here, Sarah Aldridge and Sarah Teichmann review the last decade of technological advancements in single-cell transcriptomics and highlight some of the recent discoveries enabled by this technology.

Fig. 1. Development of single-cell technologies.

Significant technology developments have enabled the profiling of large numbers of cells in parallel by single-cell transcriptomics. Initial manual methods allowed single-cell transcriptomic analysis on only a few cells. The development of integrated fluidic circuits and the introduction of liquid handling robots into the process brought cell numbers to several thousand and then further increased with nanodroplet and picowell technologies. The introduction of in situ barcoding has increased throughput even further to hundreds of thousands of cells with the latest developments in spatial methods integrating the spatial location of transcriptomic information within tissue sections.

Fig. 2. Application of single-cell technologies.

Single-cell transcriptomics are being used to create reference maps of healthy human tissues, organs and systems at single-cell resolution. These approaches are also being applied to understand non-human organisms, including mice and non-human primates. Analysing healthy versus diseased tissues and genetic variation between individuals is also a valuable platform for the understanding of disease mechanisms. Factors identified from in vivo single-cell transcriptomic studies can also be applied to generate improved in vitro models and responses to therapeutic screening can be assayed at the single-cell level.