PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Magali Soumillon
AU  - Davide Cacchiarelli
AU  - Stefan Semrau
AU  - Alexander van Oudenaarden
AU  - Tarjei S. Mikkelsen
TI  - Characterization of directed differentiation by high-throughput single-cell RNA-Seq
AID  - 10.1101/003236
DP  - 2014 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 003236
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/03/05/003236.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/03/05/003236.full
AB  - Directed differentiation of cells in vitro is a powerful approach for dissection of developmental pathways, disease modeling and regenerative medicine, but analysis of such systems is complicated by heterogeneous and asynchronous cellular responses to differentiation-inducing stimuli. To enable deep characterization of heterogeneous cell populations, we developed an efficient digital gene expression profiling protocol that enables surveying of mRNA in thousands of single cells at a time. We then applied this protocol to profile 12,832 cells collected at multiple time points during directed adipogenic differentiation of human adipose-derived stem/stromal cells in vitro. The resulting data reveal the major axes of cell-to-cell variation within and between time points, and an inverse relationship between inflammatory gene expression and lipid accumulation across cells from a single donor.