This webinar will provide an overview of recent advances in single-cell RNA sequencing from the perspectives of three research organizations.

Our first speaker, Ashley Byrne of the University of California, Santa Cruz, will discuss a long-read cDNA sequencing approach based on Oxford Nanopore sequencing technology to evaluate RNA isoform diversity in single B cells.

Using this approach, Byrne and colleagues have been able to reconstruct isoform-level transcriptomes using their analysis pipeline Mandalorion. They also discovered that much of the RNA isoform diversity observed is found across B cell-specific receptors, which could have implications for immunotherapy design — specifically for targeting B cell lymphomas.

Next, Junyue Cao of the University of Washington will share a combinatorial indexing strategy to profile the transcriptomes of single cells or nuclei.

Cao's team used the method, called sci-RNA-seq (single cell combinatorial indexing RNA sequencing) to profile nearly 50,000 cells from the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans at the L2 stage, which is over 50-fold “shotgun cellular coverage” of its somatic cell composition. Cao will discuss how the data generated by sci-RNA-seq constitute a powerful resource for nematode biology and foreshadow similar atlases for other organisms.

Our third speaker, Kate Hall of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, will share two different workflows her team has developed to streamline single-cell RNA-seq services.

The first workflow uses the Single Cell Chromium Controller from 10X Genomics and allows thousands of cells to be pooled together and processed as a single reaction. The high-throughput nature of this method can help identify unique cell populations in a given pool. The second workflow uses the Mantis small-volume pipetting robot from Formulatrix to set up quarter-sized reactions for cDNA synthesis on individual cells. This workflow is more suitable for a smaller sample set as it can help give a more detailed view of specific cell types via full-length transcript sequencing.

For more information on other webinar in this series, click here.