Plate in situ hybridization (PISH) as a time and cost effective RNA expression assay to study phenotypic heterogeneity in a population of cultured murine cells at single cell resolution.

OBJECTIVES

Regenerative medicine approaches using reprogrammed or transdifferentiated cells require efficient single cell expression profiling to analyze culture homogeneity for quality control and recipients' safety.

RESULTS

While antigen-antibody based systems have been developed for several proteins, probing at the mRNA level allows for more flexibility, faster adaption to the ever increasing new data from next generation sequencing and increased specificity, especially for genes of conserved gene families.

CONCLUSIONS

We developed a time and cost effective expression profiling assay for monolayer cell culture in 96-well plates based on RNA in situ hybridization, termed PISH, at single cell resolution.