The rapid progress of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) at large scales has led to what seemed impossible until recently: the generation of comprehensive transcriptional maps of nearly all cells in multicellular tissues. We pinpoint three key elements as being critical to the production of these maps: scalability, spatial information, and accuracy of the transcriptome of the individual cells. Here, we discuss the ramifications of traditional cell-isolation protocols when capturing the transcriptional signature of cells as they exist in their native tissue context, the methods that have been developed to avoid these distortions, and the biological processes that have unraveled on account of these upgraded methodological approaches.

大规模单细胞 RNA 测序 (scRNA-seq) 的快速发展导致了直到最近才看似不可能的事情：生成多细胞组织中几乎所有细胞的全面转录图谱。我们确定了对生成这些图谱至关重要的三个关键要素：可扩展性、空间信息和单个细胞转录组的准确性。在这里，我们讨论了传统细胞分离方案在捕获细胞在其天然组织环境中存在的转录特征时的后果，为避免这些扭曲而开发的方法，以及由于这些原因而解开的生物学过程升级的方法方法。