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Comment
. 2023 Feb 28;3(2):100416.
doi: 10.1016/j.crmeth.2023.100416. eCollection 2023 Feb 27.

Advancing massive transcriptional profiling of single bacteria

Affiliations
Comment

Advancing massive transcriptional profiling of single bacteria

Antoine-Emmanuel Saliba. Cell Rep Methods. .

Abstract

Single-bacteria RNA-seq is becoming a transformative technology for elucidating bacterial diversity in ecology, microbial communities, and pathogenicity. In a recent report by Ma et al. published in Cell, the authors present BacDrop, a versatile, high-throughput method for capturing the transcriptomes of millions of bacteria.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
BacDrop reveals within-bacterial-population heterogeneity with unprecedented resolution (A) BacDrop workflow is outlined. Bacterial cells are fixed and permeabilized, and RNA molecules are barcoded two times in plates and in droplets. At the end, cDNA is sequenced using next generation sequencing. (B) BacDrop was applied to decompose the response of K. pneumoniae to three antibiotics. UMAP embeddings could delineate the specific transcriptional response to each antibiotic, and zooming in on the response to one antibiotic could further reveal the spectrum of response of K. pneumoniae to a specific stress.

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