Researchers say they have found a better way to examine individual cells, and this tool provided insight that could inform the treatment of leukemia.
The team used a technique called microarrayed single-cell sequencing (MASC-seq) to examine individual cells in samples from patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).
This revealed a number of CLL subclones within each sample that exhibited different gene expression.
“With this new, highly cost-effective technology, we can now get a whole new view of this complexity within the blood cancer sample,” said study author Joakim Lundeberg, PhD, of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
“Molecular resolution of single cells is likely to become a more widely used therapy option.”
Dr Lundeberg and his colleagues described this work in Nature Communications.
The researchers said current methods of single-cell analysis don’t allow for the combination of cell imaging and transcriptome profiling, exhibit low-throughput by analyzing a single cell at a time, or require expensive droplet instrumentation for high-throughput analysis.
MASC-seq, on the other hand, can image cells to provide information on morphology and profile the expression of thousands of single cells per day at a cost of $0.13 USD per cell.
Dr Lundeberg and his colleagues tested MASC-seq by analyzing samples from 3 patients with different subtypes of CLL.
The team found clear differences in the average gene expression levels of cells from the different CLL subtypes, but they also found subtle differences between single cells within each of the subtypes.
The researchers therefore concluded that MASC-seq has the potential to accelerate the study of subtle clonal dynamics and help provide insight into the development of CLL and other diseases.
