Single-cell profiling of the developing mouse brain and spinal cord with split-pool barcoding

TLDR

Single‑cell genomic techniques enable high‑throughput gene expression profiling, yet many methods still have limited throughput. The authors applied SPLiT‑seq, a combinatorial barcoding approach that obviates physical cell isolation, to profile over 100,000 single‑cell transcriptomes from mouse brains and spinal cords at 2 and 11 days post‑birth, linking the data to spatial atlases to infer developmental lineages. Rosenberg et al.

Abstract

Identifying single-cell types in the mouse brain The recent development of single-cell genomic techniques allows us to profile gene expression at the single-cell level easily, although many of these methods have limited throughput. Rosenberg et al. describe a strategy called split-pool ligation-based transcriptome sequencing, or SPLiT-seq, which uses combinatorial barcoding to profile single-cell transcriptomes without requiring the physical isolation of each cell. The authors used their method to profile >100,000 single-cell transcriptomes from mouse brains and spinal cords at 2 and 11 days after birth. Comparisons with in situ hybridization data on RNA expression from Allen Institute atlases linked these transcriptomes with spatial mapping, from which developmental lineages could be identified. Science , this issue p. 176