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The transcriptional profile of each single cell varies among cell populations during embryonic development. Although single molecular in situ hybridization can be used to visualize the expression of a small number of genes1, single cell mRNA sequencing (scRNA-Seq) provides an unbiased approach to illustrate genome-wide expression patterns of genes in single cells. After it was first published in 20092, scRNA-Seq has been applied to study multiple tissues at multiple developmental stages in the recent years3,4,5. Also, as the human cell atlas has launched its developmental-focused projects recently, more single cell data from human embryonic tissues are expected to be generated in the near future.
The heart as the first organ to develop plays a critical role in embryonic development. The heart consists of multiple cell types and the development of each cell type is tightly regulated temporally and spatially. Over the past few years, the origin and cell lineage of cardiac cells at early developmental stages have been characterized6, which provide a tremendous useful navigation tool for understanding congenital heart disease pathogenesis, as well as for developing more technologically advanced methods to stimulate cardiomyocyte regeneration7.
The scRNA-Seq has undergone a rapid expansion in recent years8,9,10. With the newly developed methods, design and analysis of single cell experiments has become more achievable11,12,13,14. The method presented here is a commercial procedure based on the droplet solutions (see Table of Materials)15,16. This method features capturing cells and sets of uniquely barcoded beads in an oil-water emulsion droplet under control of a microfluidic controller system. The rate of cell loading into the droplets is extremely low so that the majority of droplet emulsions contain only one cell17. The procedure's ingenious design comes from single cell separation into droplet emulsions occurring simultaneously with barcoding, which enables the parallel analysis of individual cells using RNA-Seq on a heterogeneous population.
The incorporation of multiplexing strategies is one of the important additions to the traditional single cell workflow13,14. This addition is very useful in discarding cell doublets, reducing experimental costs, and eliminating batch effects18,19. A lipid based barcoding strategy and an antibody based barcoding strategy (see Table of Materials) are the two mostly used multiplexing methods. Specific barcodes are used to label each sample in both methods, and the labeled samples are then mixed for single cell capturing, library preparation, and sequencing. Afterwards, the pooled sequencing data can be separated by analyzing the barcode sequences (Figure 1)19. However, significant differences exist between the two methods. The lipid based barcoding strategy is based on lipid-modified oligonucleotides, which has not been found to have any cell type preferences. While the antibody based barcoding strategy can only detect the cells expressing the antigen proteins19,20. In addition, it takes about 10 min to stain the lipids but 40 min to stain the antibodies (Figure 1). Furthermore, the lipid-modified oligonucleotides are cheaper than antibody-conjugated oligonucleotides but not commercially available at the time of writing this article. Finally, the lipid-based strategy can multiplex 96 samples in one experiment, but the antibody-based strategy currently can only multiplex 12 samples.
The recommended cell number to multiplex in a single experiment should be lower than 2.5 x 104, otherwise, it will lead to a high percentage of cell doublets and potential ambient mRNA contamination. Through the multiplexing strategies, the cost of single cell capturing, cDNA generation, and library preparation for multiple samples will be reduced to the cost of one sample but the sequencing cost will remain the same.