The new disco method enables scrna SEQ single cell sequencing to process samples effectively with fewer cells

The new disco method enables scrna SEQ single cell sequencing to process samples effectively with fewer cells

Single cell RNA sequencing, or scrna SEQ for short, is a technology that allows scientists to study gene expression in single cells in a mixed population, which is the way all cells exist in human tissues.

As a part of the large family of single cell sequencing technology, scrna SEQ involves capturing the RNA of a single cell and sequencing it after multiple molecular transformation reactions. Since RNA is an intermediate step from DNA genes to proteins, it provides a description of which genes are active and which are not active in a particular cell.

Because scrna SEQ captures the activity of all genes in the cell genome and captures thousands of genes at a time, it has become the gold standard for defining cell state and phenotype. Such data can reveal rare cell types in cell populations, even types never seen before.

But scrna SEQ is not only a tool for basic cell biology; It is widely used in medical and pharmacological research because it can identify which cells in the tissue are actively dividing, or which cells respond to specific drugs or treatments.

These single-cell methods have changed our ability to analyze cell characteristics between systems.

However, the problem encountered by researchers is that scrna SEQ is currently customized for large unit input.

This is not a small problem because the scrna SEQ method requires more than 1000 cells to make useful measurements. This makes them inefficient and expensive to process small individual samples (such as small tissue or patient biopsy). These samples often need to be solved by loading a large number of samples, resulting in chaotic mosaic cell population readings.

The disco solution

Bues, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of technology EPFL, and a team composed of Marjan bio č anin and Joern pezoldt have now developed a new method to allow scrna SEQ to process samples effectively with fewer cells. This method, published in the Journal of natural methods, is called disco, deterministic, mRNA capture bed and cell co encapsulation dropping system.