ork seemingly accomplishes several major interesting points. To the technical side, it brings a hitherto non-existent technology for characterising single-cell chromatin accessibility. In a magnificent example of what a smart and simple wet–lab setting helped by appropriate mathematical implementations may become, this single-cell barcoding method seems away cheaper and more scalable (able to afford more single cells) than its putative micro-compartmentalized equivalent. To the understanding of cell populations provides strong evidence of the expected heterogeneity regarding the accessibility of chromatin, which has important potential implications for understanding achitecture and control of the gene expression in complex tissues and organisms. Additionally, this work seems to consolidate the methodological concept of single-cell barcoding, which could be an extraordinary source of information about how cells work and how they are integrated into the tissue. Thus, having promising applications to human health as you can already see in another work2 last May. There, a different modality of single-cell barcoding is used for testing whether intratumoral heterogeneity could act as a source of therapeutic resistance or that resistance rises from de novo alterations during the treatment.
- Cusanovich, D. A. et al. (2015) Multiplex single-cell profiling of chromatin accessibility by combinatorial cellular indexing. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.aab1601. ↩
- Bhang, H. C. et al. (2015) Studying clonal dynamics in response to cancer therapy using high-complexity barcoding Nat. Med. DOI: 10.1038/nm.3841) ↩