Investigating evolutionary perspective of carcinogenesis with single-cell transcriptome analysis.

Investigating evolutionary perspective of carcinogenesis with single-cell transcriptome analysis. Chin J Cancer. 2013 Dec;32(12):636-9 Authors: Zhang X, Zhang C, Li Z, Zhong J, Weiner LP, Zhong JF Abstract We developed phase-switch microfluidic devices for molecular profiling of a large number of single cells. Whole genome microarrays and RNA-sequencing are commonly used to determine the expression levels of genes in cell lysates (a physical mix of millions of cells) for inferring gene functions. However, cellular heterogeneity becomes an inherent noise in the measurement of gene expression. The unique molecular characteristics of individual cells, as well as the temporal and quantitative information of gene expression in cells, are lost when averaged among all cells in cell lysates. Our single-cell technology overcomes this limitation and enables us to obtain a large number of single-cell transcriptomes from a population of cells. A collection of single-cell molecular profiles allows us to study carcinogenesis from an evolutionary perspective by treating cancer as a diverse population of cells with abnormal molecular characteristics. Because a cancer cell population contains cells at various stages of development toward drug resistance, clustering similar single-cell molecular profiles could reveal how drug-resistant sub-clones evolve during cancer treatment. Here, we discuss how single-cell transcriptome analysis technology could e...
Source: Chinese Journal of Cancer - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: Chin J Cancer Source Type: research