Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.
EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.
Brief Funct Genomics. 2018 Jul 1;17(4):209-219. doi: 10.1093/bfgp/elx025.
Analysing transcriptomes of cell populations is a standard molecular biology approach to understand how cells function. Recent methodological development has allowed performing similar experiments on single cells. This has opened up the possibility to examine samples with limited cell number, such as cells of the early embryo, and to obtain an understanding of heterogeneity within populations such as blood cell types or neurons. There are two major approaches for single-cell transcriptome analysis: quantitative reverse transcription PCR (RT-qPCR) on a limited number of genes of interest, or more global approaches targeting entire transcriptomes using RNA sequencing. RT-qPCR is sensitive, fast and arguably more straightforward, while whole-transcriptome approaches offer an unbiased perspective on a cell's expression status.
分析细胞群体的转录组是了解细胞功能的一种标准分子生物学方法。最近的方法学发展使得在单细胞上进行类似的实验成为可能。这为研究细胞数量有限的样本（如早期胚胎细胞）提供了可能，并使我们能够了解细胞群体（如血细胞类型或神经元）内的异质性。单细胞转录组分析有两种主要方法：对少数感兴趣的基因进行定量逆转录 PCR（RT-qPCR），或使用 RNA 测序对整个转录组进行更全面的方法。RT-qPCR 具有灵敏度高、速度快的特点，可以说是更直接，而全转录组方法则提供了对细胞表达状态的无偏视角。
