Researchers created a groundbreaking new platform that could genetically "barcode" tens of thousands of cells all at the same time.
If someone handed you a smoothie and asked you to determine every ingredient that went into it the feat would be difficult because all of the ingredients would be combined to create on flavor, Harvard Medical School reported. To continue the example (in a bit of a gross way), imagine the smoothie was made up of 20,000 ground up brain cells. Tests could be run to determine what cells were present in the smoothie, but their origins would be more difficult to determine, leaving you with only a general cell profile of the sample. A similar scenario is true for human tissue because he cell averages of these samples don't paint the whole picture.
"If you take a hunk of tissue and grind it up and analyze the RNA, you have no idea if it represents what every cell in that population is doing or what no cell in the population is doing," said Marc Kirschner, the John Franklin Enders University Professor of Systems Biology and chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. "Imagine if you had a population of men and women. If you assume everyone is an average of men and women, you [probably] wouldn't represent a single person in that population."
These tissues now must be characterized cell-by-cell, or at least by cell type, which is time consuming and often costly. To remedy this, scientists have developed high-throughput techniques that give each cell an individualized "genetic barcode," this allows them to analyze complex tissue by profiling each cell instead of averaging the entire population.
"Different cells in a tissue use the same genome in amazingly diverse ways: to engineer specialized cell shapes, accomplish diverse feats of physiology, and mount distinct functional responses to the same stimulus. These techniques will finally let science understand how biological systems operate at that single-cell level," said Steven McCarroll, assistant professor of genetics at HMS. "We are so excited about the work ahead."
The researchers hope these new innovations will allow researchers to discover new cell types, and even create maps of cell diversity in tissues like the brain, leading to a better understanding of genetic disease.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Cell.
