Single Cell Genomics

The study of the individuality of cells using omics techniques is known as single-cell genomics. Despite its infancy, the field has now reached adolescence and is beginning to show signs of maturity. Its roots can be traced back to pioneering investigations that used microarrays to monitor gene expression in single cells. Single-cell genomics, on the other hand, took off with the introduction of "next-generation" DNA sequencing. Despite the fact that first experiments were small in scale and produced noisy and incomplete data, they quickly demonstrated the enormous potential for biological discoveries. It was quickly apparent that the significant technical and biological diversity needed data from a large number of single cells in order to allow effective data mining and interpretation. The sequencing of a single-cell genome or transcriptome to gather genomic, transcriptome, or other multi-omics information to show cell population distinctions and cellular evolutionary links is referred to as single-cell sequencing technologies. Traditional sequencing methods can only retrieve the average of a large number of cells, making it impossible to evaluate a small number of cells and resulting in the loss of cellular heterogeneity information. Single-cell technologies have the benefit of detecting heterogeneity among individual cells, distinguishing a small number of cells, and outlining cell maps when compared to standard sequencing techniques.