Journal Article

Single-cell sequencing-based technologies will revolutionize whole-organism science

Linnarsson, Sten, Shapiro, Ehud, Biezuner, Tamir

2013

Overview

Key Points Advances in DNA sequencing enable the analysis of the genomes and transcriptomes of single cells and will soon enable single-cell epigenomic and proteomic analyses. Single-cell genomic analysis can reveal genomic variability among individual cells, which can be used to reconstruct cellular ancestries in the form of a lineage tree. Single-cell transcriptome analysis can be used to study the functional states of individual cells and to infer and discover cell types in an unbiased manner. Future integrated single-cell analyses based on high-throughput sequencing will enable the simultaneous analysis of genomic, transcriptomic and epigenomic states of cells. Such data will reveal the ancestries of cells, their types, their current functional states and may be used to infer the types and functional states of their ancestors. Integrated single-cell analyses will shed light on fundamental questions of biology and medicine, including questions of the origin and development of cancer, the number of and relationship between human cell types, and the rate and structure of cell turnover in regenerating tissues. Technologies that are based on next-generation sequencing are increasingly being used to study individual cells. The authors discuss the application of this approach to single-cell genomics and transcriptomics, and explore the implications for both basic research and medicine. The unabated progress in next-generation sequencing technologies is fostering a wave of new genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics and proteomics technologies. These sequencing-based technologies are increasingly being targeted to individual cells, which will allow many new and longstanding questions to be addressed. For example, single-cell genomics will help to uncover cell lineage relationships; single-cell transcriptomics will supplant the coarse notion of marker-based cell types; and single-cell epigenomics and proteomics will allow the functional states of individual cells to be analysed. These technologies will become integrated within a decade or so, enabling high-throughput, multi-dimensional analyses of individual cells that will produce detailed knowledge of the cell lineage trees of higher organisms, including humans. Such studies will have important implications for both basic biological research and medicine.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group
• Subject: 631/136 / 631/208/212/2019 / 631/208/514/2254 / Agriculture / Animal Genetics and Genomics / Animals / Biomedicine / Cancer Research / Cell division / Cell Separation - methods / DNA methylation / DNA sequencing / Epigenomics / Gene Expression Profiling / Gene Function / Genomics / High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing - methods / Human Genetics / Humans / Nucleotide sequencing / Proteomics / review-article / Science / Single-Cell Analysis - methods