2020-01-26 by Quick Biology Inc.
Single-cell analysis has been becoming popular for understanding the patterns of genomic or transcriptomic variations in complex organs. Quick Biology has given lots of examples that how single cell sequencing technology accelerates researchers’ work (News in 11/10/2019, 09/01/2019, 08/18/2019, 03/21/2019).
Most single cell platforms are droplet-based methods. In recent Genome Research, Li and his colleagues from Cold Spring Harbor developed a new assay, called BAG-seq. They used 5’-acrydite oligonucleotides to copolymerize single-cell DNA or RNA into balls of acrylamide gel (BAG). Like Polony (https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/27/24/e34/2902337) developed by George Church Lab at Harvard, Li locked single cell nucleic acids in polyacrylamide, then these localized DNAs or RNAs undergo following enzymatic reactions such as RT, barcoding, amplification (Figure 1). The authors claimed that BAG-seq can solve cell cross-contamination due to droplet merging and breakage in some droplet-based microfluidic single cell platforms. The authors also claimed BAG-seq can be used for rare, valuable samples such as cells from biopsy washes, or cells micro-dissected from tissue samples. BAG-seq set-up requires only inexpensive standard equipment and reagents, it is affordable compared to other single cell library preparation.
Figure 1: Schematic of single-cell DNA or RNA BAG-seq workflow (ref1)
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Ref:
- Li, S., Kendall, J., Park, S., Wang, Z., Alexander, J., Moffitt, A., … Wigler, M. (2019). Copolymerization of single cell nucleic acids into balls of acrylamide gel. Genome Research, 1–33.