Tumor Functional Heterogeneity Unraveled by scRNA-seq Technologies

Effective cancer treatment has been precluded by the presence of various forms of intratumoral complexity that drive treatment resistance and metastasis. Recent single-cell sequencing technologies are significantly facilitating the characterization of tumor internal architecture during disease progression. New applications and advances occurring at a fast pace predict an imminent broad application of these technologies in many research areas. As occurred with next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, once applied to clinical samples across tumor types, single-cell sequencing technologies could trigger an exponential increase in knowledge of the molecular pathways involved in cancer progression and contribute to the improvement of cancer treatment

Single-cell RNA-seq data from microfluidic emulsion

<div>Gene-count files and metadata files for single cells from different organs of mice processed on the 10X Genomics Platform. The counts are given using the .mtx file output by the CellRanger program, with one folder per run.</div><div><br></div><div>Includes data for 422,803 droplets, 55,656 of which passed a QC cutoff of 500 genes and 1000 UMI.</div><div><br></div><div><div>Cell annotations using the Cell Ontology [1] controlled vocabulary are in a separate csv.</div><div><br></div><div>[1] http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/cl.owl</div></div><div><br></div

The Human Cell Atlas: making Cell Space for disease

A single change in DNA, RNA, proteins or cellular images can be useful as a biomarker of disease onset or progression. With high-throughput molecular phenotyping of single cells, it is now conceivable that the molecular changes occurring across thousands, or tens of thousands, of individual cells could additionally be considered as a disease biomarker. Transition to a disease state would then be reflected by the shifts in cell numbers and locations across a multidimensional space that is defined by the molecular content of cells. Realising this ambition requires a robust formulation of such a multidimensional ‘cell space’. This is one of the goals of the recently launched Human Cell Atlas project. A second goal is to populate this ‘cell space’ with all cell types in the human body. Here, I consider the potential of the Human Cell Atlas project for improving our description and understanding of the cell-type specificity of disease