Using single-cell genomics to understand developmental processes and cell fate decisions

High-throughput -omics techniques have revolutionised biology, allowing for thorough and unbiased characterisation of the molecular states of biological systems. However, cellular decision-making is inherently a unicellular process to which “bulk” -omics techniques are poorly suited, as they capture ensemble averages of cell states. Recently developed single-cell methods bridge this gap, allowing high-throughput molecular surveys of individual cells. Researchers from the University of Cambridge discuss core concepts of analysis of single-cell gene expression data and highlight areas of developmental biology where single-cell techniques have made important contributions. These include understanding of cell-to-cell heterogeneity, the tracing of differentiation pathways, quantification of gene expression from specific alleles, and the future directions of cell lineage tracing and spatial gene expression analysis.

Single‐cell library preparation summary

There are two primary methods for generating single‐cell transcriptomics data: plate‐based and droplet‐based methods, shown above. In summary, droplet‐based approaches offer high cell throughput, while plate‐based approaches provide higher resolution in each individual cell. Note that different implementations of these methods provide slightly different outputs and that some steps are excluded for clarity (e.g. cDNA amplification).