单细胞转录组学:背景,技术,应用和挑战

RNA sequencing, or RNA-Seq, is a high-throughput sequencing technology used to study the transcriptome of a cell. Transcriptomics helps to interpret the functional elements of a genome and identify the molecular constituents of an organism. Additionally, it also helps in understanding the development of an organism and the occurrence of diseases. 
Before the discovery of RNA-seq, microarray-based methods and Sanger sequencing were used for transcriptome analysis. However, while...

Cell separation was first achieved in 1964 by S. H. Seal, who separated large tumor cells from the smaller blood cells using filtration. Two years later, Pohl and Hawk performed experiments on how cells respond differently to a nonuniform electric field based on the cell type. Such observations were the inception of cell separation methods, which allow isolating a single cell type from a heterogeneous sample.

Ribosome profiling or ribo-sequencing is a deep sequencing technique that produces a snapshot of active translation in a cell. It selectively sequences the mRNAs protected by ribosomes to get an insight into a cell’s translation landscape at any given point in time.
Applications of ribosome profiling
Ribosome profiling has many applications, including in vivo monitoring of translation inside a particular organ or tissue type and quantifying new protein synthesis levels.
The technique...

Genomics is the science of genomes: it is the study of all the genetic material of an organism. In humans, the genome consists of information carried in 23 pairs of chromosomes in the nucleus, as well as mitochondrial DNA. In genomics, both coding and non-coding DNA is sequenced and analyzed. Genomics allows a better understanding of all living things, their evolution, and their diversity. It has a myriad of uses: for example, to build phylogenetic trees, to improve productivity and...