Living the single life

摘要

Understanding how single cells within an individual person,tissue or organ differ throughout development or as a result of disease has great potential to help advance personalised medicine.Since high throughput single cell applications based on microfluidic droplet technology came to the fore in 2015,researchers have taken advantage of single cell RNA-seq(scRNA-seq)methods to increase their knowledge of cell development,immunology and immunotherapy,as well as tumour heterogeneity,lineage analysis and clonal evolution.The commercial availability of easy-to-use microfluidic instruments has helped drive the acceptance and widespread use of high throughput scRNA-seq,particularly in the materials science and chemistry sectors.Biologists were slower to embrace this technology,perhaps believing that it was necessary to become an expert in setting up microfluidic experiments.Everything changed with the advent of intuitive,application-orientated microfluidic instruments,enabling researchers to explore cell diversity and tissue heterogeneity,and quantify gene expression at the single cell level.