Cancer is a disease driven by genomic mutation and selection. While the advent of next generation sequencing has revolutionized genomic analysis, the data obtained from bulk sequencing do not represent the heterogeneity in cancer. Single-cell RNA sequencing has advanced the knowledge of cellular heterogeneity, but this method is limited to the analysis of transcriptomes. As proteins are the key functional machinery of cells, capturing the differential protein expression from cell to cell would benefit the study of cancer biology. Multimodal approaches such as CITE-seq only partially address this problem by allowing simultaneous analysis of transcriptome and surface proteins, but not intracellular proteins that play vital roles in cellular functions. Additionally, these methods do not directly analyze DNA, hence do not provide a readout of genotypic information such as single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) and copy number variations (CNVs).
In this poster we describe a technology to overcome these hurdles. Using a novel workflow, cells treated with barcoded antibodies are encapsulated in droplets using the Mission Bio Tapestri Platform and subsequently processed to obtain DNA and protein information from the same single cells.
