scholarly journals Single cell profiling of total RNA using Smart-seq-total

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina Isakova ◽  
Norma Neff ◽  
Stephen R. Quake
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Embryonic Stem ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Embryoid Bodies ◽  
High Yield ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Mcf7 Cells ◽  
Total Rna ◽  
Non Coding Rna

ABSTRACTThe ability to interrogate total RNA content of single cells would enable better mapping of the transcriptional logic behind emerging cell types and states. However, current RNA-seq methods are unable to simultaneously monitor both short and long, poly(A)+ and poly(A)-transcripts at the single-cell level, and thus deliver only a partial snapshot of the cellular RNAome. Here, we describe Smart-seq-total, a method capable of assaying a broad spectrum of coding and non-coding RNA from a single cell. Built upon the template-switch mechanism, Smart-seq-total bears the key feature of its predecessor, Smart-seq2, namely, the ability to capture full-length transcripts with high yield and quality. It also outperforms current poly(A)–independent total RNA-seq protocols by capturing transcripts of a broad size range, thus, allowing us to simultaneously analyze protein-coding, long non-coding, microRNA and other non-coding RNA transcripts from single cells. We used Smart-seq-total to analyze the total RNAome of human primary fibroblasts, HEK293T and MCF7 cells as well as that of induced murine embryonic stem cells differentiated into embryoid bodies. We show that simultaneous measurement of non-coding RNA and mRNA from the same cell enables elucidation of new roles of non-coding RNA throughout essential processes such as cell cycle or lineage commitment. Moreover, we show that cell types can be distinguished based on the abundance of non-coding transcripts alone.

scholarly journals Single-cell quantification of a broad RNA spectrum reveals unique noncoding patterns associated with cell types and states

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (51) ◽  
pp. e2113568118
Author(s):  
Alina Isakova ◽  
Norma Neff ◽  
Stephen R. Quake
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Noncoding Rna ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Embryonic Stem ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Embryoid Bodies ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Total Rna ◽  
Rna Transcripts ◽  
Rna Content

The ability to interrogate total RNA content of single cells would enable better mapping of the transcriptional logic behind emerging cell types and states. However, current single-cell RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) methods are unable to simultaneously monitor all forms of RNA transcripts at the single-cell level, and thus deliver only a partial snapshot of the cellular RNAome. Here we describe Smart-seq-total, a method capable of assaying a broad spectrum of coding and noncoding RNA from a single cell. Smart-seq-total does not require splitting the RNA content of a cell and allows the incorporation of unique molecular identifiers into short and long RNA molecules for absolute quantification. It outperforms current poly(A)-independent total RNA-seq protocols by capturing transcripts of a broad size range, thus enabling simultaneous analysis of protein-coding, long-noncoding, microRNA, and other noncoding RNA transcripts from single cells. We used Smart-seq-total to analyze the total RNAome of human primary fibroblasts, HEK293T, and MCF7 cells, as well as that of induced murine embryonic stem cells differentiated into embryoid bodies. By analyzing the coexpression patterns of both noncoding RNA and mRNA from the same cell, we were able to discover new roles of noncoding RNA throughout essential processes, such as cell cycle and lineage commitment during embryonic development. Moreover, we show that independent classes of short-noncoding RNA can be used to determine cell-type identity.

scholarly journals Methods and sensors for functional genomic studies of cell-cycle transitions in single cells

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (10) ◽  
pp. 468-477
Author(s):  
Alexander C. Zambon ◽  
Tom Hsu ◽  
Seunghee Erin Kim ◽  
Miranda Klinck ◽  
Jennifer Stowe ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cell Cycle ◽  
Single Cell ◽  
Single Cell Analysis ◽  
Imaging System ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Cell Analysis ◽  
Mcf7 Cells ◽  
Genomic Studies ◽  
Cell Subpopulations

Much of our understanding of the regulatory mechanisms governing the cell cycle in mammals has relied heavily on methods that measure the aggregate state of a population of cells. While instrumental in shaping our current understanding of cell proliferation, these approaches mask the genetic signatures of rare subpopulations such as quiescent (G0) and very slowly dividing (SD) cells. Results described in this study and those of others using single-cell analysis reveal that even in clonally derived immortalized cancer cells, ∼1–5% of cells can exhibit G0 and SD phenotypes. Therefore to enable the study of these rare cell phenotypes we established an integrated molecular, computational, and imaging approach to track, isolate, and genetically perturb single cells as they proliferate. A genetically encoded cell-cycle reporter (K67p-FUCCI) was used to track single cells as they traversed the cell cycle. A set of R-scripts were written to quantify K67p-FUCCI over time. To enable the further study G0 and SD phenotypes, we retrofitted a live cell imaging system with a micromanipulator to enable single-cell targeting for functional validation studies. Single-cell analysis revealed HT1080 and MCF7 cells had a doubling time of ∼24 and ∼48 h, respectively, with high duration variability in G1 and G2 phases. Direct single-cell microinjection of mRNA encoding (GFP) achieves detectable GFP fluorescence within ∼5 h in both cell types. These findings coupled with the possibility of targeting several hundreds of single cells improves throughput and sensitivity over conventional methods to study rare cell subpopulations.

scholarly journals Computational approaches towards reducing contamination in single-cell RNA-seq data

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siamak Yousefi ◽  
Hao Chen ◽  
Jesse F. Ingels ◽  
Melinda S. McCarty ◽  
Arthur G. Centeno ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Cell Capture ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Sequence Analyses ◽  
Cell Functions ◽  
Biological Interpretation ◽  
Different Cell Types

SUMMARYSingle cell RNA sequencing has enabled quantification of single cells and identification of different cell types and subtypes as well as cell functions in different tissues. Single cell RNA sequence analyses assume acquired RNAs correspond to cells, however, RNAs from contamination within the input data are also captured by these assays. The sequencing of background contamination as well as unwanted cells making their way to the final assay Potentially confound the correct biological interpretation of single cell transcriptomic data. Here we demonstrate two approaches to deal with background contamination as well as profiling of unwanted cells in the assays. We use three real-life datasets of whole-cell capture and nucleotide single-cell captures generated by Fluidigm and 10x technologies and show that these methods reduce the effect of contamination, strengthen clustering of cells and improves biological interpretation.

scholarly journals scTPA: A web tool for single-cell transcriptome analysis of pathway activation signatures

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Zhang ◽  
Yaru Zhang ◽  
Jun Hu ◽  
Ji Zhang ◽  
Fangjie Guo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Single Cell ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Biological Pathways ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Web Tool ◽  
Functional Interpretation ◽  
Cell Functions ◽  
Pathway Activation

ABSTRACTThe most fundamental challenge in current single-cell RNA-seq data analysis is functional interpretation and annotation of cell clusters. The biological pathways in distinct cell types have different activation patterns, which facilitates understanding cell functions in single-cell transcriptomics. However, no effective web tool has been implemented for single-cell transcriptomic data analysis based on prior biological pathway knowledge. Here, we introduce scTPA (http://sctpa.bio-data.cn/sctpa), which is a web-based platform providing pathway-based analysis of single-cell RNA-seq data in human and mouse. scTPA incorporates four widely-used gene set enrichment methods to estimate the pathway activation scores of single cells based on a collection of available biological pathways with different functional and taxonomic classifications. The clustering analysis and cell-type-specific activation pathway identification were provided for the functional interpretation of cell types from pathway-oriented perspective. An intuitive interface allows users to conveniently visualize and download single-cell pathway signatures. Together, scTPA is a comprehensive tool to identify pathway activation signatures for dissecting single cell heterogeneity.

scholarly journals Comprehensive single cell transcriptional profiling of a multicellular organism by combinatorial indexing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junyue Cao ◽  
Jonathan S. Packer ◽  
Vijay Ramani ◽  
Darren A. Cusanovich ◽  
Chau Huynh ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Expression Profiles ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Transcriptional Profiling ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Cell Capture ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Major Step ◽  
C Elegans

AbstractConventional methods for profiling the molecular content of biological samples fail to resolve heterogeneity that is present at the level of single cells. In the past few years, single cell RNA sequencing has emerged as a powerful strategy for overcoming this challenge. However, its adoption has been limited by a paucity of methods that are at once simple to implement and cost effective to scale massively. Here, we describe a combinatorial indexing strategy to profile the transcriptomes of large numbers of single cells or single nuclei without requiring the physical isolation of each cell (Single cell Combinatorial Indexing RNA-seq or sci-RNA-seq). We show that sci-RNA-seq can be used to efficiently profile the transcriptomes of tens-of-thousands of single cells per experiment, and demonstrate that we can stratify cell types from these data. Key advantages of sci-RNA-seq over contemporary alternatives such as droplet-based single cell RNA-seq include sublinear cost scaling, a reliance on widely available reagents and equipment, the ability to concurrently process many samples within a single workflow, compatibility with methanol fixation of cells, cell capture based on DNA content rather than cell size, and the flexibility to profile either cells or nuclei. As a demonstration of sci-RNA-seq, we profile the transcriptomes of 42,035 single cells from C. elegans at the L2 stage, effectively 50-fold “shotgun cellular coverage” of the somatic cell composition of this organism at this stage. We identify 27 distinct cell types, including rare cell types such as the two distal tip cells of the developing gonad, estimate consensus expression profiles and define cell-type specific and selective genes. Given that C. elegans is the only organism with a fully mapped cellular lineage, these data represent a rich resource for future methods aimed at defining cell types and states. They will advance our understanding of developmental biology, and constitute a major step towards a comprehensive, single-cell molecular atlas of a whole animal.

ColorCells: a database of expression, classification and functions of lncRNAs in single cells

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ling-Ling Zheng ◽  
Jing-Hua Xiong ◽  
Wu-Jian Zheng ◽  
Jun-Hao Wang ◽  
Zi-Liang Huang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Tissue Specificity ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Noncoding Rnas ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Marker Genes ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Expression Variability ◽  
Expression Classification

Abstract Although long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have significant tissue specificity, their expression and variability in single cells remain unclear. Here, we developed ColorCells (http://rna.sysu.edu.cn/colorcells/), a resource for comparative analysis of lncRNAs expression, classification and functions in single-cell RNA-Seq data. ColorCells was applied to 167 913 publicly available scRNA-Seq datasets from six species, and identified a batch of cell-specific lncRNAs. These lncRNAs show surprising levels of expression variability between different cell clusters, and has the comparable cell classification ability as known marker genes. Cell-specific lncRNAs have been identified and further validated by in vitro experiments. We found that lncRNAs are typically co-expressed with the mRNAs in the same cell cluster, which can be used to uncover lncRNAs’ functions. Our study emphasizes the need to uncover lncRNAs in all cell types and shows the power of lncRNAs as novel marker genes at single cell resolution.

scholarly journals Sierra: discovery of differential transcript usage from polyA-captured single-cell RNA-seq data

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Patrick ◽  
David T. Humphreys ◽  
Vaibhao Janbandhu ◽  
Alicia Oshlack ◽  
Joshua W.K. Ho ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Mononuclear Cells ◽  
Human Peripheral Blood ◽  
Cardiac Fibroblasts ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Computational Pipeline ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Peripheral Blood Mononuclear ◽  
Mrna Isoform

AbstractHigh-throughput single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) is a powerful tool for studying gene expression in single cells. Most current scRNA-seq bioinformatics tools focus on analysing overall expression levels, largely ignoring alternative mRNA isoform expression. We present a computational pipeline, Sierra, that readily detects differential transcript usage from data generated by commonly used polyA-captured scRNA-seq technology. We validate Sierra by comparing cardiac scRNA-seq cell-types to bulk RNA-seq of matched populations, finding significant overlap in differential transcripts. Sierra detects differential transcript usage across human peripheral blood mononuclear cells and the Tabula Muris, and 3’UTR shortening in cardiac fibroblasts. Sierra is available at https://github.com/VCCRI/Sierra.

scholarly journals LTMG: A novel statistical modeling of transcriptional expression states in single-cell RNA-Seq data

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Changlin Wan ◽  
Wennan Chang ◽  
Yu Zhang ◽  
Fenil Shah ◽  
Xiaoyu Lu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Gene Expression ◽  
Single Cell ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
R Package ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Cell Functions ◽  
Transcriptional Regulatory ◽  
A Cell

ABSTRACTA key challenge in modeling single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data is to capture the diverse gene expression states regulated by different transcriptional regulatory inputs across single cells, which is further complicated by a large number of observed zero and low expressions. We developed a left truncated mixture Gaussian (LTMG) model that stems from the kinetic relationships between the transcriptional regulatory inputs and metabolism of mRNA and gene expression abundance in a cell. LTMG infers the expression multi-modalities across single cell entities, representing a gene’s diverse expression states; meanwhile the dropouts and low expressions are treated as left truncated, specifically representing an expression state that is under suppression. We demonstrated that LTMG has significantly better goodness of fitting on an extensive number of single-cell data sets, comparing to three other state of the art models. In addition, our systems kinetic approach of handling the low and zero expressions and correctness of the identified multimodality are validated on several independent experimental data sets. Application on data of complex tissues demonstrated the capability of LTMG in extracting varied expression states specific to cell types or cell functions. Based on LTMG, a differential gene expression test and a co-regulation module identification method, namely LTMG-DGE and LTMG-GCR, are further developed. We experimentally validated that LTMG-DGE is equipped with higher sensitivity and specificity in detecting differentially expressed genes, compared with other five popular methods, and that LTMG-GCR is capable to retrieve the gene co-regulation modules corresponding to perturbed transcriptional regulations. A user-friendly R package with all the analysis power is available at https://github.com/zy26/LTMGSCA.

scholarly journals A Scalable Strand-Specific Protocol Enabling Full-Length Total RNA Sequencing From Single Cells

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Haile ◽  
Richard D. Corbett ◽  
Veronique G. LeBlanc ◽  
Lisa Wei ◽  
Stephen Pleasance ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Gene Expression ◽  
Single Cell ◽  
Rna Sequencing ◽  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Sequencing Data ◽  
Total Rna ◽  
Specific Protocol

RNA sequencing (RNAseq) has been widely used to generate bulk gene expression measurements collected from pools of cells. Only relatively recently have single-cell RNAseq (scRNAseq) methods provided opportunities for gene expression analyses at the single-cell level, allowing researchers to study heterogeneous mixtures of cells at unprecedented resolution. Tumors tend to be composed of heterogeneous cellular mixtures and are frequently the subjects of such analyses. Extensive method developments have led to several protocols for scRNAseq but, owing to the small amounts of RNA in single cells, technical constraints have required compromises. For example, the majority of scRNAseq methods are limited to sequencing only the 3′ or 5′ termini of transcripts. Other protocols that facilitate full-length transcript profiling tend to capture only polyadenylated mRNAs and are generally limited to processing only 96 cells at a time. Here, we address these limitations and present a novel protocol that allows for the high-throughput sequencing of full-length, total RNA at single-cell resolution. We demonstrate that our method produced strand-specific sequencing data for both polyadenylated and non-polyadenylated transcripts, enabled the profiling of transcript regions beyond only transcript termini, and yielded data rich enough to allow identification of cell types from heterogeneous biological samples.

Space: the final frontier — achieving single-cell, spatially resolved transcriptomics in plants

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sai Guna Ranjan Gurazada ◽  
Kevin L. Cox, ◽  
Kirk J. Czymmek ◽  
Blake C. Meyers
Keyword(s):  
Single Cell ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Regulatory Networks ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Transcriptional Analysis ◽  
Rna Seq ◽  
Tissue Sections ◽  
Spatially Resolved ◽  
Computational Aspects

Single-cell RNA-seq is a tool that generates a high resolution of transcriptional data that can be used to understand regulatory networks in biological systems. In plants, several methods have been established for transcriptional analysis in tissue sections, cell types, and/or single cells. These methods typically require cell sorting, transgenic plants, protoplasting, or other damaging or laborious processes. Additionally, the majority of these technologies lose most or all spatial resolution during implementation. Those that offer a high spatial resolution for RNA lack breadth in the number of transcripts characterized. Here, we briefly review the evolution of spatial transcriptomics methods and we highlight recent advances and current challenges in sequencing, imaging, and computational aspects toward achieving 3D spatial transcriptomics of plant tissues with a resolution approaching single cells. We also provide a perspective on the potential opportunities to advance this novel methodology in plants.

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