Depletion of Ribosomal RNA Sequences from Single-Cell RNA-Sequencing Library

Recent advances in single-cell RNA sequencing technologies have revealed high heterogeneity of gene expression profiles in individual cells. However, most current single-cell RNA-seq methods use oligo-dT priming in the reverse transcription steps and detect only polyA-positive for more accuracy, since there are also polyA-positive non-coding RNAs transcripts, not other important RNA species, such as polyA-negative noncoding RNA. Reverse transcription using random oligos enables detection of not only the noncoding RNA species without polyA tails, but also ribosomal RNA (rRNA). rRNA comprises more than 90% of the total RNA and should be depleted from the RNA-seq library to ensure efficient usage of the sequencing capacity. Commonly used hybridization-based rRNA depletion methods can preserve noncoding RNA in the standard RNA-seq library. However, such rRNA depletion methods require high input amounts of total RNA and do not work at the single-cell level or with limited input DNA. This unit describes a novel procedure for RNA-seq library construction from single cells or a minimal amount of RNA. A thermostable duplex-specific nuclease is used in this method to effectively remove ribosomal RNA sequences following whole-transcriptome amplification and sequencing library construction. © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.