Tis’ the season to CELLebrate new discoveries made using solutions from 10x Genomics
As a young and growing company, nothing indicates the success and adoption of our products better than peer-reviewed scientific literature. This year, we have watched with delight as our database of customer publications has grown by more than 400%. Represented in these publications are many important biological discoveries that have significant impact on our understanding of biological systems and disease. It has been extremely exciting and gratifying to watch this body of work develop, so we've put together a brief recap of some of the research papers published this year that feature products from 10x Genomics.
Single cell gene expression studies reveal previously unknown cell types and cellular mechanisms
With the Chromium Single Cell Gene Expression solution, researchers can examine the gene expression profiles of hundreds to tens of thousands of individual cells in a single experiment, providing unprecedented insight into cell populations and their behavior. Using this solution, one group of scientists identified a rare lung cell type that proved to be key for understanding the cellular basis of Cystic Fibrosis (Montoro et al. 2018), while others discovered three functionally distinct sub-types of auditory neurons in the inner ear (Sun et al. 2018), revealing auditory processing mechanisms and identifying new approaches for treating deafness. A clinical research team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center profiled tumor samples from melanoma patients and identified a novel mechanism of immunotherapy resistance, which has therapeutic implications for rescue (Paulson et al. 2018). Finally, in a study featured on the cover of Nature, researchers profiled transcriptomes of 70,000 single cells from human placentas and matched maternal blood, revealing ways in which pregnancy reshapes maternal immune activity (Vento-Tormo et al. 2018). This work lays the foundation for future studies of pregnancy complications such as stillbirth and miscarriage.
A new method for investigating complex microbial communities
A team of scientists at Stanford University published a new method for de novo assembly of metagenomic communities sampled directly from human stool (Bishara et al. 2018). Their method uses Chromium Linked-Read sequencing and a novel computational analysis pipeline, Athena, and has produced the most contiguous metagenomic assemblies reported to date.
Organoid modeling of tumor immune microenvironment
In a recent publication in Cell, a team of scientists led by Calvin Kuo (Stanford University School of Medicine) used the Chromium Single Cell Immune Profiling solution to examine patient-derived tumor organoids (PDOs) and compare them to initial tumor biopsies (Neal et al. 2018). Using 5’ gene expression to characterize the tumor microenvironment and V(D)J sequencing to characterize the T-Cell receptor (TCR) repertoire, they demonstrated that PDOs preserve both the tumor infiltrating lymphocytes and the dominant TCR clonotypes from the original tumors. Importantly, they also demonstrated that PDOs functionally recapitulate the PD-1/PD-L1-dependent immune checkpoint blockade. Thus, this method for propagating PDOs provides an accurate in vitro model for the tumor-immune microenvironment that can facilitate immuno-oncology investigations and personalized immunotherapy testing.
These examples touch on only a few of the hundreds of scientific contributions that our customers have made this year. You can find a full list of publications using 10x products on our website (here), and we encourage you to explore our wide-ranging collection of literature. Sort by product and research area to quickly navigate to publications relevant to your research, and access the latest discoveries made with 10x technology.