We envision that this primary Single Cell Transcriptomics Platform will consist of three layers: (1) establishment of already available and in-house validated scRNA-seq approaches such as Smart-seq2, Drop-seq, and 10X Genomics; (2) implementation of a state-of-the-art spatial transcriptomics workflow, as the resolution of cells not only in time but also in space has significant fundamental and clinical potential; and (3) provision of bioinformatic data analysis services and workflows centered around our principal software tool, ASAP (Gardeux et al., Bioinformatics, 2017).
The recent development of single cell-targeting, high-throughput sequencing methods is revolutionizing our ability to tackle biological heterogeneity. One of these approaches is single cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq), which has the capacity to assess the mRNA repertoire of hundreds to thousands of individual cells at a time. In the short period since its development, scRNA-seq has been truly transformative by uniquely enabling the identification and molecular characterization of healthy and pathological cells and the definition of cell type-specific signatures.
