Brady G
School of Biological Sciences, G.38 Stopford Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PT, UK.
Yeast. 2000 Sep 30;17(3):211-7. doi: 10.1002/1097-0061(20000930)17:3<211::AID-YEA26>3.0.CO;2-7.
Increasingly mRNA expression patterns established using a variety of molecular technologies such as cDNA microarrays, SAGE and cDNA display are being used to identify potential regulatory genes and as a means of providing valuable insights into the biological status of the starting sample. Until recently, the application of these techniques has been limited to mRNA isolated from millions or, at very best, several thousand cells thereby restricting the study of small samples and complex tissues. To overcome this limitation a variety of amplification approaches have been developed which are capable of broadly evaluating mRNA expression patterns in single cells. This review will describe approaches that have been employed to examine global gene expression patterns either in small numbers of cells or, wherever possible, in actual isolated single cells. The first half of the review will summarize the technical aspects of methods developed for single-cell analysis and the latter half of the review will describe the areas of biological research that have benefited from single-cell expression analysis.
利用多种分子技术（如cDNA微阵列、SAGE和cDNA展示）建立的mRNA表达模式越来越多地被用于识别潜在的调控基因，并作为深入了解起始样本生物学状态的一种手段。直到最近，这些技术的应用还局限于从数百万个细胞（或最多几千个细胞）中分离出的mRNA，从而限制了对小样本和复杂组织的研究。为了克服这一限制，已经开发了多种扩增方法，这些方法能够广泛评估单个细胞中的mRNA表达模式。本综述将描述用于检查少量细胞或尽可能实际分离的单个细胞中的全局基因表达模式的方法。综述的前半部分将总结为单细胞分析开发的方法的技术方面，后半部分将描述受益于单细胞表达分析的生物学研究领域。
