Biomedical Pioneering Innovation Center (BIOPIC), School of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR), 6-2-3, Furuedai, Suita, Osaka, Japan.
Protein Cell. 2022 Mar;13(3):167-179. doi: 10.1007/s13238-021-00868-1. Epub 2021 Aug 17.
Tumors are complex ecosystems in which heterogeneous cancer cells interact with their microenvironment composed of diverse immune, endothelial, and stromal cells. Cancer biology had been studied using bulk genomic and gene expression profiling, which however mask the cellular diversity and average the variability among individual molecular programs. Recent advances in single-cell transcriptomic sequencing have enabled a detailed dissection of tumor ecosystems and promoted our understanding of tumorigenesis at single-cell resolution. In the present review, we discuss the main topics of recent cancer studies that have implemented single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). To study cancer cells, scRNA-seq has provided novel insights into the cancer stem-cell model, treatment resistance, and cancer metastasis. To study the tumor microenvironment, scRNA-seq has portrayed the diverse cell types and complex cellular states of both immune and non-immune cells interacting with cancer cells, with the promise to discover novel targets for future immunotherapy.
肿瘤是一个复杂的生态系统，其中异质性的癌细胞与其由不同的免疫细胞、内皮细胞和基质细胞组成的微环境相互作用。癌症生物学一直是通过大规模基因组和基因表达谱分析来研究的，但这种方法掩盖了细胞的多样性，并平均了个体分子程序之间的可变性。单细胞转录组测序的最新进展使得对肿瘤生态系统进行详细剖析，并促进了我们对单细胞分辨率下肿瘤发生的理解。在本综述中，我们讨论了最近实施单细胞 RNA 测序 (scRNA-seq) 的癌症研究的主要课题。为了研究癌细胞，scRNA-seq 为癌症干细胞模型、治疗耐药性和癌症转移提供了新的见解。为了研究肿瘤微环境，scRNA-seq 描绘了与癌细胞相互作用的免疫细胞和非免疫细胞的多种细胞类型和复杂细胞状态，并有望发现未来免疫治疗的新靶点。
