scholarly journals ID: 1027 High-Throughput, Single Cell Whole Transcriptome Sequencing Analysis of Cancer Cells with the New BD FACSMelody™ Cell Sorter and BD™ Precise assay

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (S) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Xiaoyang (Alice) Wang ◽  
Chip Lomas ◽  
Craig Betts ◽  
Aaron Walker ◽  
Christina Fan ◽  
...  

Gene expression studies performed on bulk samples might obscure the understanding of complex samples. Gene expression analyses performed on single cells, however, can offer a powerful method to resolve sample heterogeneity and reveal hidden biology. Optimal sample preparation is critical to obtain high quality gene expression data from single cells.Historically, single cells or small numbers of cells were isolated and prepared by limiting dilutions, laser capture microdissection, or microfluidics technologies, or fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). FACS sorting enables highthroughput processing of a heterogeneous mixture of cells and ensures the delivery of single cells or a small number ofcells into a chosen receptacle to meet the selection criteria at a purity level that is unmatched by other approaches.Furthermore, by FACS, the single cell selection criteria can be based on surface marker expression, cell size, and granularity(represented by scatter). Sorted cells can be used for any downstream application including next generation sequencing(NGS).In this study, the new, easy-to-use BD FACSMelody™ sorter was applied to sort individual cancer cells. Jurkat cells (a Tleukemia cell line), and T47D cells (a breast cancer cell line) were mixed, stained, analyzed, and sorted on a BD FACSMelody system. The individual cell’s whole transcriptome was interrogated using BD™ Precise Single Cell WTA (whole transcriptome amplification) Assay. Principal component analysis was applied to cluster the sorted Jurkat and T47D-cell populations.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska C. Durst ◽  
Ana Grujovic ◽  
Iris Ganser ◽  
Martin Hoffmann ◽  
Peter Ugocsai ◽  
...  

AbstractGene expression analysis of rare or heterogeneous cell populations such as disseminated cancer cells (DCCs) requires a sensitive method allowing reliable analysis of single cells. Therefore, we developed and explored the feasibility of a quantitative PCR (qPCR) assay to analyze single-cell cDNA pre-amplified using a previously established whole transcriptome amplification (WTA) protocol. We carefully selected and optimized multiple steps of the protocol, e.g. re-amplification of WTA products, quantification of amplified cDNA yields and final qPCR quantification, to identify the most reliable and accurate workflow for quantitation of gene expression of the ERBB2 gene in DCCs. We found that absolute quantification outperforms relative quantification. We then validated the performance of our method on single cells of established breast cancer cell lines displaying distinct levels of HER2 protein. The different protein levels were faithfully reflected by transcript expression across the tested cell lines thereby proving the accuracy of our approach. Finally, we applied our method on patient-derived breast cancer DCCs. Here, we were able to measure ERBB2 expression levels in all HER2-positive DCCs. In addition, we could detect ERBB2 transcript expression even in HER2-negative DCCs, suggesting post-transcriptional mechanisms of HER2 loss in anti-HER2-treated DCCs. In summary, we developed a reliable single-cell qPCR assay applicable to measure distinct levels of ERBB2 in DCCs.


2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1786) ◽  
pp. 20190098 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chuan Ku ◽  
Arnau Sebé-Pedrós

Understanding the diversity and evolution of eukaryotic microorganisms remains one of the major challenges of modern biology. In recent years, we have advanced in the discovery and phylogenetic placement of new eukaryotic species and lineages, which in turn completely transformed our view on the eukaryotic tree of life. But we remain ignorant of the life cycles, physiology and cellular states of most of these microbial eukaryotes, as well as of their interactions with other organisms. Here, we discuss how high-throughput genome-wide gene expression analysis of eukaryotic single cells can shed light on protist biology. First, we review different single-cell transcriptomics methodologies with particular focus on microbial eukaryote applications. Then, we discuss single-cell gene expression analysis of protists in culture and what can be learnt from these approaches. Finally, we envision the application of single-cell transcriptomics to protist communities to interrogate not only community components, but also the gene expression signatures of distinct cellular and physiological states, as well as the transcriptional dynamics of interspecific interactions. Overall, we argue that single-cell transcriptomics can significantly contribute to our understanding of the biology of microbial eukaryotes. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Single cell ecology’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (13) ◽  
pp. 5979-5984 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yahui Ji ◽  
Dongyuan Qi ◽  
Linmei Li ◽  
Haoran Su ◽  
Xiaojie Li ◽  
...  

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are important intercellular mediators regulating health and diseases. Conventional methods for EV surface marker profiling, which was based on population measurements, masked the cell-to-cell heterogeneity in the quantity and phenotypes of EV secretion. Herein, by using spatially patterned antibody barcodes, we realized multiplexed profiling of single-cell EV secretion from more than 1,000 single cells simultaneously. Applying this platform to profile human oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) cell lines led to a deep understanding of previously undifferentiated single-cell heterogeneity underlying EV secretion. Notably, we observed that the decrement of certain EV phenotypes (e.g.,CD63+EV) was associated with the invasive feature of both OSCC cell lines and primary OSCC cells. We also realized multiplexed detection of EV secretion and cytokines secretion simultaneously from the same single cells to investigate the multidimensional spectrum of cellular communications, from which we resolved tiered functional subgroups with distinct secretion profiles by visualized clustering and principal component analysis. In particular, we found that different cell subgroups dominated EV secretion and cytokine secretion. The technology introduced here enables a comprehensive evaluation of EV secretion heterogeneity at single-cell level, which may become an indispensable tool to complement current single-cell analysis and EV research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (Suppl 1) ◽  
pp. A12.1-A12
Author(s):  
Y Arjmand Abbassi ◽  
N Fang ◽  
W Zhu ◽  
Y Zhou ◽  
Y Chen ◽  
...  

Recent advances of high-throughput single cell sequencing technologies have greatly improved our understanding of the complex biological systems. Heterogeneous samples such as tumor tissues commonly harbor cancer cell-specific genetic variants and gene expression profiles, both of which have been shown to be related to the mechanisms of disease development, progression, and responses to treatment. Furthermore, stromal and immune cells within tumor microenvironment interact with cancer cells to play important roles in tumor responses to systematic therapy such as immunotherapy or cell therapy. However, most current high-throughput single cell sequencing methods detect only gene expression levels or epigenetics events such as chromatin conformation. The information on important genetic variants including mutation or fusion is not captured. To better understand the mechanisms of tumor responses to systematic therapy, it is essential to decipher the connection between genotype and gene expression patterns of both tumor cells and cells in the tumor microenvironment. We developed FocuSCOPE, a high-throughput multi-omics sequencing solution that can detect both genetic variants and transcriptome from same single cells. FocuSCOPE has been used to successfully perform single cell analysis of both gene expression profiles and point mutations, fusion genes, or intracellular viral sequences from thousands of cells simultaneously, delivering comprehensive insights of tumor and immune cells in tumor microenvironment at single cell resolution.Disclosure InformationY. Arjmand Abbassi: None. N. Fang: None. W. Zhu: None. Y. Zhou: None. Y. Chen: None. U. Deutsch: None.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wu Liu ◽  
Mehmet U. Caglar ◽  
Zhangming Mao ◽  
Andrew Woodman ◽  
Jamie J. Arnold ◽  
...  

SUMMARYDevelopment of antiviral therapeutics emphasizes minimization of the effective dose and maximization of the toxic dose, first in cell culture and later in animal models. Long-term success of an antiviral therapeutic is determined not only by its efficacy but also by the duration of time required for drug-resistance to evolve. We have developed a microfluidic device comprised of ~6000 wells, with each well containing a microstructure to capture single cells. We have used this device to characterize enterovirus inhibitors with distinct mechanisms of action. In contrast to population methods, single-cell analysis reveals that each class of inhibitor interferes with the viral infection cycle in a manner that can be distinguished by principal component analysis. Single-cell analysis of antiviral candidates reveals not only efficacy but also properties of the members of the viral population most sensitive to the drug, the stage of the lifecycle most affected by the drug, and perhaps even if the drug targets an interaction of the virus with its host.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Groß ◽  
Csaba Jeney ◽  
Darius Halm ◽  
Günter Finkenzeller ◽  
G. Björn Stark ◽  
...  

AbstractThe homogeneity of the genetically modified single-cells is a necessity for many applications such as cell line development, gene therapy, and tissue engineering and in particular for regenerative medical applications. The lack of tools to effectively isolate and characterize CRISPR/Cas9 engineered cells is considered as a significant bottleneck in these applications. Especially the incompatibility of protein detection technologies to confirm protein expression changes without a preconditional large-scale clonal expansion, creates a gridlock in many applications. To ameliorate the characterization of engineered cells, we propose an improved workflow, including single-cell printing/isolation technology based on fluorescent properties with high yield, a genomic edit screen (surveyor assay), mRNA rtPCR assessing altered gene expression and a versatile protein detection tool called emulsion-coupling to deliver a high-content, unified single-cell workflow. The workflow was exemplified by engineering and functionally validating RANKL knockout immortalized mesenchymal stem cells showing altered bone formation capacity of these cells. The resulting workflow is economical, without the requirement of large-scale clonal expansions of the cells with overall cloning efficiency above 30% of CRISPR/Cas9 edited cells. Nevertheless, as the single-cell clones are comprehensively characterized at an early, highly parallel phase of the development of cells including DNA, RNA, and protein levels, the workflow delivers a higher number of successfully edited cells for further characterization, lowering the chance of late failures in the development process.Author summaryI completed my undergraduate degree in biochemistry at the University of Ulm and finished my master's degree in pharmaceutical biotechnology at the University of Ulm and University of applied science of Biberach with a focus on biotechnology, toxicology and molecular biology. For my master thesis, I went to the University of Freiburg to the department of microsystems engineering, where I developed a novel workflow for cell line development. I stayed at the institute for my doctorate, but changed my scientific focus to the development of the emulsion coupling technology, which is a powerful tool for the quantitative and highly parallel measurement of protein and protein interactions. I am generally interested in being involved in the development of innovative molecular biological methods that can be used to gain new insights about biological issues. I am particularly curious to unravel the complex and often poorly understood protein interaction pathways that are the cornerstone of understanding cellular functionality and are a fundamental necessity to describe life mechanistically.


Author(s):  
Jinfen Wei ◽  
Zixi Chen ◽  
Meiling Hu ◽  
Ziqing He ◽  
Dawei Jiang ◽  
...  

Hypoxia is a characteristic of tumor microenvironment (TME) and is a major contributor to tumor progression. Yet, subtype identification of tumor-associated non-malignant cells at single-cell resolution and how they influence cancer progression under hypoxia TME remain largely unexplored. Here, we used RNA-seq data of 424,194 single cells from 108 patients to identify the subtypes of cancer cells, stromal cells, and immune cells; to evaluate their hypoxia score; and also to uncover potential interaction signals between these cells in vivo across six cancer types. We identified SPP1+ tumor-associated macrophage (TAM) subpopulation potentially enhanced epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) by interaction with cancer cells through paracrine pattern. We prioritized SPP1 as a TAM-secreted factor to act on cancer cells and found a significant enhanced migration phenotype and invasion ability in A549 lung cancer cells induced by recombinant protein SPP1. Besides, prognostic analysis indicated that a higher expression of SPP1 was found to be related to worse clinical outcome in six cancer types. SPP1 expression was higher in hypoxia-high macrophages based on single-cell data, which was further validated by an in vitro experiment that SPP1 was upregulated in macrophages under hypoxia-cultured compared with normoxic conditions. Additionally, a differential analysis demonstrated that hypoxia potentially influences extracellular matrix remodeling, glycolysis, and interleukin-10 signal activation in various cancer types. Our work illuminates the clearer underlying mechanism in the intricate interaction between different cell subtypes within hypoxia TME and proposes the guidelines for the development of therapeutic targets specifically for patients with high proportion of SPP1+ TAMs in hypoxic lesions.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolai Slavov ◽  
David Botstein ◽  
Amy Caudy

Yeast cells grown in culture can spontaneously synchronize their respiration, metabolism, gene expression and cell division. Such metabolic oscillations in synchronized cultures reflect single-cell oscillations, but the relationship between the oscillations in single cells and synchronized cultures is poorly understood. To understand this relationship and the coordination between metabolism and cell division, we collected and analyzed DNA-content, gene-expression and physiological data, at hundreds of time-points, from cultures metabolically-synchronized at different growth rates, carbon sources and biomass densities. The data enabled us to extend and generalize our mechanistic model, based on ensemble average over phases (EAP), connecting the population-average gene-expression of asynchronous cultures to the gene-expression dynamics in the single-cells comprising the cultures. The extended model explains the carbon-source specific growth-rate responses of hundreds of genes. Our physiological data demonstrate that the frequency of metabolic cycling in synchronized cultures increases with the biomass density, suggesting that this cycling is an emergent behavior, resulting from the entraining of the single-cell metabolic cycle by a quorum-sensing mechanism, and thus underscoring the difference between metabolic cycling in single cells and in synchronized cultures. Measurements of constant levels of residual glucose across metabolically synchronized cultures indicate that storage carbohydrates are required to fuel not only the G1/S transition of the division cycle but also the metabolic cycle. Despite the large variation in profiled conditions and in the scale of their dynamics, most genes preserve invariant dynamics of coordination with each other and with the rate of oxygen consumption. Similarly, the G1/S transition always occurs at the beginning, middle or end of the high oxygen consumption phases, analogous to observations in human and drosophila cells. These results highlight evolutionary conserved coordination among metabolism, cell growth and division.


Author(s):  
Kenneth H. Hu ◽  
John P. Eichorst ◽  
Chris S. McGinnis ◽  
David M. Patterson ◽  
Eric D. Chow ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTSpatial transcriptomics seeks to integrate single-cell transcriptomic data within the 3-dimensional space of multicellular biology. Current methods use glass substrates pre-seeded with matrices of barcodes or fluorescence hybridization of a limited number of probes. We developed an alternative approach, called ‘ZipSeq’, that uses patterned illumination and photocaged oligonucleotides to serially print barcodes (Zipcodes) onto live cells within intact tissues, in real-time and with on-the-fly selection of patterns. Using ZipSeq, we mapped gene expression in three settings: in-vitro wound healing, live lymph node sections and in a live tumor microenvironment (TME). In all cases, we discovered new gene expression patterns associated with histological structures. In the TME, this demonstrated a trajectory of myeloid and T cell differentiation, from periphery inward. A variation of ZipSeq efficiently scales to the level of single cells, providing a pathway for complete mapping of live tissues, subsequent to real-time imaging or perturbation.


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