Fig. 1: Development of single-cell technologies.
Significant technology developments have enabled the profiling of large numbers of cells in parallel by single-cell transcriptomics. Initial manual methods allowed single-cell transcriptomic analysis on only a few cells. The development of integrated fluidic circuits and the introduction of liquid handling robots into the process brought cell numbers to several thousand and then further increased with nanodroplet and picowell technologies. The introduction of in situ barcoding has increased throughput even further to hundreds of thousands of cells with the latest developments in spatial methods integrating the spatial location of transcriptomic information within tissue sections.
