Department of Pathology and Center for Cancer Research, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA; Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
Department of Molecular Cell Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 761001, Israel.
Mol Cell. 2019 Jul 11;75(1):7-12. doi: 10.1016/j.molcel.2019.05.003.
Bulk genomic analyses and expression profiling of clinical specimens have shaped much of our understanding of cancer in patients. However, human tumors are intricate ecosystems composed of diverse cells, including malignant, immune, and stromal subsets, whose precise characterization is masked by bulk genomic methods. Single-cell genomic techniques have emerged as powerful approaches to dissect human tumors at the resolution of individual cells, providing a compelling approach to deciphering cancer biology. Here, we discuss some of the common themes emerging from initial studies of single-cell RNA sequencing in cancer and then highlight challenges in cancer biology for which emerging single-cell genomics methods may provide a compelling approach.
大量基因组分析和临床标本的表达谱分析已经极大地改变了我们对患者癌症的认识。然而，人类肿瘤是由多种细胞组成的复杂生态系统，包括恶性、免疫和基质亚群，其精确特征被批量基因组方法所掩盖。单细胞基因组技术已成为解析人类肿瘤的强大方法，其分辨率可达单个细胞，为解析癌症生物学提供了一种有吸引力的方法。在这里，我们讨论了单细胞 RNA 测序在癌症研究中的一些初步研究中出现的共同主题，然后强调了癌症生物学中的一些挑战，对于这些挑战，新兴的单细胞基因组学方法可能提供一种有吸引力的方法。
