During the past decade, refinement of established molecular methods and also development of new technologies have opened up new practical possibilities to capture and analyse single cells in highly reproducible manners. Technologies like single-cell transcriptomics by RNA sequencing now provide unprecedented opportunities to draw a more accurate picture of cell population complexity and to understand cell variation and plasticity in a wide range of biological contexts, from cell development and differentiation to disease transitions. Besides the characterization of complex populations, advancements in single-cell technologies offer the opportunity to capture and characterize individual cells of interest from complex samples (e.g. Circulating Tumour Cells). This EMBO Practical Course will present two different cutting-edge technological approaches for gene expression analysis of thousands of single-cells simultaneously (10x Genomics emulsion-sequencing) and for recovery and characterization or rare cells from living heterogeneous cell population (Silicon Biosystem – DEPArray platform). The participants will learn about the complete workflow and gain understanding about the possibilities and limitations of both methodologies. Both lectures and hands-on sessions will include an introduction to the bioinformatics tools that are required to analyse this complex datasets.
This EMBO Practical Course is intended for scientists who are interested to approach different cutting-edge single-cell methodologies and is aimed for PhD students, postdoctoral fellows or other scientists with a solid molecular biology background.
