TY - JOUR T1 - Characterization of directed differentiation by high-throughput single-cell RNA-Seq JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/003236 SP - 003236 AU - Magali Soumillon AU - Davide Cacchiarelli AU - Stefan Semrau AU - Alexander van Oudenaarden AU - Tarjei S. Mikkelsen Y1 - 2014/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/03/05/003236.abstract N2 - 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. ER -