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Hydro-Seq enables contamination-free high-throughput single-cell RNA-sequencing for circulating tumor cells.

ABSTRACT: Molecular analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) at single-cell resolution offers great promise for cancer diagnostics and therapeutics from simple liquid biopsy. Recent development of massively parallel single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) provides a powerful method to resolve the cellular heterogeneity from gene expression and pathway regulation analysis. However, the scarcity of CTCs and the massive contamination of blood cells limit the utility of currently available technologies. Here, we present Hydro-Seq, a scalable hydrodynamic scRNA-seq barcoding technique, for high-throughput CTC analysis. High cell-capture efficiency and contamination removal capability of Hydro-Seq enables successful scRNA-seq of 666 CTCs from 21 breast cancer patient samples at high throughput. We identify breast cancer drug targets for hormone and targeted therapies and tracked individual cells that express markers of cancer stem cells (CSCs) as well as of epithelial/mesenchymal cell state transitions. Transcriptome analysis of these cells provides insights into monitoring target therapeutics and processes underlying tumor metastasis.

SUBMITTER: Cheng YH

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6520360 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Hydro-Seq enables contamination-free high-throughput single-cell RNA-sequencing for circulating tumor cells.

Cheng Yu-Heng YH Chen Yu-Chih YC Lin Eric E Brien Riley R Jung Seungwon S Chen Yu-Ting YT Lee Woncheol W Hao Zhijian Z Sahoo Saswat S Min Kang Hyun H Cong Jason J Burness Monika M Nagrath Sunitha S S Wicha Max M Yoon Euisik E

Nature communications 20190515 1

Molecular analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) at single-cell resolution offers great promise for cancer diagnostics and therapeutics from simple liquid biopsy. Recent development of massively parallel single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) provides a powerful method to resolve the cellular heterogeneity from gene expression and pathway regulation analysis. However, the scarcity of CTCs and the massive contamination of blood cells limit the utility of currently available technologies. Here ...[more]

PMID: 31092822

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Project description:Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) holds great potential to revolutionize our understanding of cancer biology by discovering biomarkers and biological functions from circulating tumor cells (CTCs). However, the contamination from blood cells is one of the main challenges in CTC studies. Through investigation of recently published studies, we found that several previously reported CTC “biomarkers” were apparently contaminated by blood-derived transcripts such as HBB, HBA1/2, ITGA2B, and LCP1. Through re-analysis of several published CTC and cell line datasets, we revealed that CTC “biomarkers” were not only highly expressed in blood, but showed a high correlation between CTC and blood. We sequenced transcriptome of seven blood components from a healthy donor, finding that the platelet exhibited the highest probability to confound CTC data in terms of expression profiling and correlation analysis. Using CTC spike-in and recovery assay and we showed that the platelet induced artifacts could be reproduced in vitro. Surprisingly, the reproduced artifacts were also highly expressed in the platelet data but not in the other six blood components. We performed SNP calling on recovered CTC simulators, finding cross-contamination of exogenous transcripts. Furthermore, we applied a multiple linear regression model to estimate the platelet confounding index, showing that previously published CTC datasets were confounded with 13%~26% of platelet fractions and 7.9%~17% platelet cloaking judged by fluorescence flow cytometry. We devised a red blood cell lysis based protocol that better removed platelet compared to several platelet inhibitory reagents and kept transcriptomic profile undisturbed in CTC scRNA-seq. This work not only demonstrated the potential blood cell confounding factors in CTC studies, validated them in the past published datasets, and reproduced the artifacts in CTC simulation assay, but also devised an easily applicable method to remove the platelet cloaking, guaranteeing the reliability of CTC scRNA-seq research.

Dataset Information

Hydro-Seq enables contamination-free high-throughput single-cell RNA-sequencing for circulating tumor cells.

Publications

Hydro-Seq enables contamination-free high-throughput single-cell RNA-sequencing for circulating tumor cells.

Similar Datasets

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