Complex biological questions being addressed using single cell sequencing technologies

Biologists have long desired to understand multi-cellular processes at the resolution of the single cell. Tremendous efforts have been made over more than a century to decipher biology at the single cell level from the advent of immunohistochemistry to high-plex multi-parametric cytometry. More recently, technological developments in extracting and labelling nucleic acids from single cells have boosted single-cell information acquisition to include the genome, transcriptome, epigenome, proteome, and more, even simultaneously collecting data from multiple modalities. Here we will review some of the original motivations that have driven the development of new single cell tools, providing perspective on why these new tools were created and which tools we hope to see developed in the future.