How low can you go? Studying Transcription at the Single-Cell Level

Figures & data

Dan Larson

(Courtesy of NIH Photography)

Individual FKBP5 mRNA transcripts in A549 lung carcinoma cells, imaged using RNA FISH.

(Image courtesy of Olivia Padovan-Merhar, Arjun Raj Lab)

Arjun Raj

(Image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania)

Using MALBAC, X. Sunney Xie and his team identified 35 single nucleotide variations in a single cancer cell that do not exist in the bulk population. Now Xie is applying this same method to decode single-cell transcriptomes.

Image from Zong at al, Science, 338:1622-26, 2012