Journal Article

Simultaneous profiling of transcriptome and DNA methylome from a single cell

An, Qin, Hu, Ganlu, Wang, Cun-Yu, Du, Guizhen, Zhu, Xianmin, Fan, Guoping, Hu, Youjin, Xue, Jinfeng, Xue, Zhigang, Huang, Kevin

2016

Overview

Background Single-cell transcriptome and single-cell methylome technologies have become powerful tools to study RNA and DNA methylation profiles of single cells at a genome-wide scale. A major challenge has been to understand the direct correlation of DNA methylation and gene expression within single-cells. Due to large cell-to-cell variability and the lack of direct measurements of transcriptome and methylome of the same cell, the association is still unclear. Results Here, we describe a novel method (scMT-seq) that simultaneously profiles both DNA methylome and transcriptome from the same cell. In sensory neurons, we consistently identify transcriptome and methylome heterogeneity among single cells but the majority of the expression variance is not explained by proximal promoter methylation, with the exception of genes that do not contain CpG islands. By contrast, gene body methylation is positively associated with gene expression for only those genes that contain a CpG island promoter. Furthermore, using single nucleotide polymorphism patterns from our hybrid mouse model, we also find positive correlation of allelic gene body methylation with allelic expression. Conclusions Our method can be used to detect transcriptome, methylome, and single nucleotide polymorphism information within single cells to dissect the mechanisms of epigenetic gene regulation.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Animal Genetics and Genomics / animal models / Animals / Bioinformatics / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Cells, Cultured / CpG Islands / Deoxyribonucleic acid / DNA / DNA fingerprinting / DNA Methylation / Epigenetics / Evolutionary Biology / Gene expression / Gene Expression Profiling - methods / Gene polymorphism / Gene regulation / genes / Genetic engineering / Genomes / genomic islands / Genomics / Human Genetics / hybrids / Life Sciences / Method / Mice / Mice, Inbred C57BL / Microbial Genetics and Genomics / Neurons - cytology / Neurons - metabolism / Plant Genetics and Genomics / Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide / Promoter Regions, Genetic / Ribonucleic acid / RNA / Sensory neurons / Sequence Analysis, DNA - methods / Sequence Analysis, RNA - methods / Single-Cell Analysis - methods / Single-Cell Omics / Single-nucleotide polymorphism / Transcriptome / variance