BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Sequencing in Rare Form

Algorithms identify rare cell types from RNA sequences of heterogeneous tissues

September 3, 2015 7:00 AM UTC

Single-cell RNA sequencing captures rich sets of functional information from common and rare cell types alike, but most analytical techniques can't distinguish rare signals from noise. A group from the Netherlands has published a method for identifying rare cells, dubbed RaceID, that can fish out the gene expression profiles of rare cells from heterogeneous tissues, and create maps of the different cell types in an organ.

While the group's paper, published last month in Nature, focuses on proof of concept using healthy mouse intestinal tissues, study co-author Dominic Grün believes biomedical applications are not far behind. ...