Authors
S Chetwynd1; B Taylor1; A Corrigan3; M Firth4; A Salah2;
1 AstraZeneca, UK; 2 AstraZeneca R&D, Cambridge, UK; 3 Discovery Sciences, IMED Biotech Unit, AstraZeneca, Cambridge, UK, UK; 4 Quantitative Biology, Discovery Sciences, IMED Biotech Unit, AstraZeneca, Cambridge, UK, UK
Abstract
The transcriptional profile of cells are often highly heterogenous in their microenvironment. Next generation sequencing RNA-seq methods can quantify transcript abundance at the single cell level but lose all spatial information such as cell position and interactions, morphology and transcript subcellular location. Imaging based methods such as ViewRNA or RNAScope provide such information but only quantify up to four transcripts.
Defining expression profiles of gene panels whilst retaining such spatial information would open up new possibilities for understanding primary tissues biology and provide a rich and informative dataset for cell based assays and screens. Multiplexed Error-Robust Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (MER-FISH) is a powerful imaging based transcriptomics assay which generates such information for hundreds to thousands of RNA species in single cells.
