SINGLE-CELL APPROACHES TO IMMUNE PROFILING

• Published in: Nature (London) 2018-05, Vol.557 (7706), p.595-597
• Main Author: Landhuis, Esther
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antigens; Bone marrow; Cancer; Cloning; Deoxyribonucleic acid; Disease; DNA; Flow cytometry; Immune system; Immunoglobulins; Lymphocytes T; Medical research; Mountains; Mutation; Proteins; Receptors; T cell receptors
• ISSN: 0028-0836; 1476-4687
• DOI: 10.1038/d41586-018-05214-w

Last month, at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago, Illinois, Sims chaired a session on methods for analysing the T-cell repertoire - a set of disease-fighting cells that churn out up to 1020 unique receptors over a lifetime (see 'A focus on immune receptors'). The technique gained popularity after geneticist Garry Nolan and his colleagues at California's Stanford University used it to measure 34 parameters at once in human bone-marrow cells - helping them to track simultaneously how a wide variety of immune cells were responding to different drugs2. [...]the real power of Abseq lies in its potential to integrate with other single-cell methods, says Sam Kim, a postdoc in Abate's lab who helped develop Abseq. Because it generates information that is readable by sequencing, it can assign multiple types of 'omics data - proteomes, transcriptomes, even disease-causing genetic mutations - to each cell, Kim says. ArcherDx in Boulder, Colorado; Takara Bio in Mountain View, California; iRepertoire in Huntsville, Alabama; and New England Biolabs in Ipswich, Massachusetts, sell multiplex PCR primers that researchers can use to amplify T- and B-cell receptor gene segments from their own samples.