Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Science. 2018 May 25;360(6391). doi: 10.1126/science.aaq1736. Epub 2018 Apr 19.
The transcriptome of a cell dictates its unique cell type biology. We used single-cell RNA sequencing to determine the transcriptomes for essentially every cell type of a complete animal: the regenerative planarian Planarians contain a diverse array of cell types, possess lineage progenitors for differentiated cells (including pluripotent stem cells), and constitutively express positional information, making them ideal for this undertaking. We generated data for 66,783 cells, defining transcriptomes for known and many previously unknown planarian cell types and for putative transition states between stem and differentiated cells. We also uncovered regionally expressed genes in muscle, which harbors positional information. Identifying the transcriptomes for potentially all cell types for many organisms should be readily attainable and represents a powerful approach to metazoan biology.
细胞的转录组决定了其独特的细胞类型生物学。我们使用单细胞 RNA 测序来确定完整动物的几乎所有细胞类型的转录组：再生的扁形动物 扁形动物包含各种各样的细胞类型，具有分化细胞的谱系祖细胞（包括多能干细胞），并持续表达位置信息，使它们成为这项工作的理想选择。我们生成了 66783 个细胞的数据，定义了已知和许多以前未知的扁形动物细胞类型的转录组，以及干细胞和分化细胞之间的潜在过渡状态。我们还在含有位置信息的肌肉中发现了区域表达的基因。鉴定许多生物体中所有潜在细胞类型的转录组应该很容易实现，并且是一种强大的后生动物生物学研究方法。
