Single-cell transcriptomics is revolutionizing the improvement of plant biotechnology research: recent advances and future opportunities

Abstract

Single-cell approaches are a promising way to obtain high-resolution transcriptomics data and have the potential to revolutionize the study of plant growth and development. Recent years have seen the advent of unprecedented technological advances in the field of plant biology to study the transcriptional information of individual cells by single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). This review focuses on the modern advancements of single-cell transcriptomics in plants over the past few years. In addition, it also offers a new insight of how these emerging methods will expedite advance research in plant biotechnology in the near future. Lastly, the various technological hurdles and inherent limitations of single-cell technology that need to be conquered to develop such outstanding possible knowledge gain is critically analyzed and discussed.

Keywords:

• Plants
• plant transcriptomics
• single-cell technology
• scRNA-seq

Acknowledgements

We apologize to all colleagues whose contributions have escaped our attention and those whose paper we have inadvertently omitted. All the contributors have read and approved the final version of the work. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that improved the quality of the manuscript.

Author contributions

H.K: Original draft preparation and Editing; P.J.: Data mining, Reviewing and Writing; S.J.O. and V.K.: Conceptualization, Writing, Editing and Supervision.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.