Advances in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies in the past 10 years have had a transformative effect on biomedical research, enabling the profiling and analysis of the transcriptomes of single cells at unprecedented resolution and throughput. Specifically, scRNA-seq has facilitated the identification of novel or rare cell types, the analysis of single-cell trajectory construction and stem or progenitor cell differentiation, and the comparison of healthy and disease-related tissues at single-cell resolution. These applications have been critical in advances in cardiovascular research in the past decade as evidenced by the generation of cell atlases of mammalian heart and blood vessels and the elucidation of mechanisms involved in cardiovascular development and stem or progenitor cell differentiation. In this Review, we summarize the currently available scRNA-seq technologies and analytical tools and discuss the latest findings using scRNA-seq that have substantially improved our knowledge on the development of the cardiovascular system and the mechanisms underlying cardiovascular diseases. Furthermore, we examine emerging strategies that integrate multimodal single-cell platforms, focusing on future applications in cardiovascular precision medicine that use single-cell omics approaches to characterize cell-specific responses to drugs or environmental stimuli and to develop effective patient-specific therapeutics.

过去 10 年单细胞 RNA 测序 (scRNA-seq) 技术的进步对生物医学研究产生了变革性影响，能够以前所未有的分辨率和通量对单细胞转录组进行分析和分析。具体来说，scRNA-seq 有助于识别新型或稀有细胞类型、分析单细胞轨迹构建和干细胞或祖细胞分化，以及在单细胞分辨率下比较健康组织和疾病相关组织。这些应用在过去十年中对心血管研究的进展至关重要，哺乳动物心脏和血管细胞图谱的生成以及心血管发育和干细胞或祖细胞分化所涉及机制的阐明就证明了这一点。在这篇综述中，我们总结了目前可用的 scRNA-seq 技术和分析工具，并讨论了使用 scRNA-seq 的最新发现，这些发现极大地提高了我们对心血管系统发展和心血管疾病潜在机制的认识。此外，我们研究了整合多模式单细胞平台的新兴策略，重点关注心血管精准医学的未来应用，使用单细胞组学方法来表征细胞对药物或环境刺激的特异性反应，并开发有效的患者特异性疗法。