Pluto Bioinformatics

GSE85755: Single-cell sequencing reveals dissociation-induced gene expression in tissue subpopulations

Bulk RNA sequencing

In many gene expression studies, cells are extracted by tissue dissociation and Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting (FACS), but the effect of these protocols on cellular transcriptomes is not well characterized and often ignored. Here, we applied single-cell mRNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to muscle stem cells, and unexpectedly found a subpopulation that is strongly affected by the widely-used dissociation protocol that we employed. One implication of this finding is that several published transcriptomics studies may need to be reinterpreted. Importantly, we detected similar subpopulations in other single-cell datasets, suggesting that cells from other tissues might be affected by this artefact as well. SOURCE: Susanne C,van den,Brink (s.c.vandenbrink@hotmail.com) - Alexander van Oudenaarden Hubrecht Institute