A few years ago, I highlighted a really cool technology called Drop-seq for simultaneously analyzing the gene expression activity inside thousands of individual cells. Today, one of its creators, Evan Macosko, reports significant progress in developing even better tools for single-cell analysis—with support from an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.
In a paper in the journal Science, Macosko, Fei Chen, and colleagues at the Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, recently unveiled another exciting creation called Slide-seq [1]. This technology acts as a GPS-like system for mapping the exact location of each of the thousands of individual cells undergoing genomic analysis in a tissue sample.
This 3D video shows the exquisite precision of this new cellular form of GPS, which was used to generate a high-resolution map of the different cell types found in a tiny cube of mouse brain tissue. Specifically, it provides locations of the cell types and gene expression in the hippocampal regions called CA1 (green), CA2/3 (blue), and dentate gyrus (red).
Because using Slide-seq in the lab requires no specialized imaging equipment or skills, it should prove valuable to researchers across many different biomedical disciplines who want to look at cellular relationships or study gene activity in tissues, organs, or even whole organisms.
How does Slide-seq work? Macosko says one of the main innovations is an inexpensive rubber-coated glass slide nicknamed a puck. About 3 millimeters in diameter, pucks are studded with tens of thousands of 10 micron-sized beads, each one decorated with a random snippet of genetic material—an RNA barcode—that serves as its unique identifier of the bead.
The barcodes are sequenced en masse, and the exact location of each barcoded bead is indexed using innovative software developed by a team led by Chen, who is an NIH Director’s Early Independence awardee.
Then, the researchers place a sample of fresh-frozen tissue (typically, 10 micrometers, or 0.00039 inches, thick) on the puck and dissolve the tissue, lysing the cells and releasing their messenger RNA (mRNA). That leaves only the barcoded beads binding the mRNA transcripts expressed by the cells in the tissue—a biological record of the genes that were turned on at the time the sample was frozen.
The barcoded mRNA is then sequenced. The spatial position of each mRNA molecule can be inferred, using the reference index on the puck. This gives researchers a great deal of biological information about the cells in the tissue, often including their cell type and their gene expression pattern. All the data can then be mapped out in ways similar to those seen in this video, which was created using data from 66 pucks.
Slide-seq has been tested on a range of tissues from both mouse and human, replicating results from similar maps created using existing approaches, but also uncovering new biology. For example, in the mouse cerebellum, Slide-seq allowed the researchers to detect bands of variable gene activity across the tissues. This intriguing finding suggests that there may be subpopulations of cells in this part of the brain that have gene activity influenced by their physical locations.
Such results demonstrate the value of combining cell location with genomic information. In fact, Macosko now hopes to use Slide-seq to study the response of brain cells that are located near the buildup of damaged amyloid protein associated with the early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Meanwhile, Chen is interested in pursuing cell lineage studies in a variety of tissues to see how and where changes in the molecular dynamics of tissues can lead to disease.
These are just a few examples of how Slide-seq will add to the investigative power of single-cell analysis in the years ahead. In meantime, the Macosko and Chen labs are working hard to develop even more innovative approaches to this rapidly emerging areas of biomedical research, so who knows what “seq” we will be talking about next?
If you’re curious what innovations are coming out of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, take a look at this video shot via a microscope. What at first glance looks like water dripping through pipes is actually a cool new technology for swiftly and efficiently analyzing the gene activity of thousands of individual cells. You might have to watch this video several times and use the pause button to catch all of the steps, but it provides a quick overview of how the Drop-seq microfluidic device works.
First, a nanoliter-sized droplet of lysis buffer containing a bead with a barcoded sequencing primer on its surface slides downward through the straight channel at the top of the screen. At the same time, fluid containing individual cells flows through the curved channels on either side of the bead-bearing channel—you can catch a fleeting glimpse of a tiny cell in the left-hand channel about 5 seconds into the video. The two streams (barcoded-bead primers and cells) feed into a single channel where they mix, pass through an oil flow, and get pinched off into oily drops. Most are empty, but some contain a bead or a cell—and a few contain both. At the point where the channel takes a hard left, these drops travel over a series of bumps that cause the cell to rupture and release its messenger RNA—an indicator of what genes are active in the cell. The mRNAs are captured by the primer on the bead from which, after the drops are broken, they can be transcribed, amplified, and sequenced to produce STAMPS (single-cell transcriptomes attached to microparticles). Because each bead contains its own unique barcode that enables swift identification of the transcriptomes of individual cells, this process can be done simultaneously on thousands of cells in a single reaction.
