Quantitative assessment of single-cell RNRNA-sequencing methods

Interest in single-cell whole-transcriptome analysis is growing rapidly, especially for profiling rare or heterogeneous populations of cells. We compared commercially available single-cell RNRNA amplification methods with both microliter and nanoliter volumes, using sequence from bulk total RNRNA and multiplexed quantitative PCR as benchmarks to systematically evaluate the sensitivity and accuracy of various single-cell RNRNA-seq approaches. We show that single-cell RNRNA-seq can be used to perform accurate quantitative transcriptome measurement in individual cells with a relatively small number of sequencing reads and that sequencing large numbers of single cells can recapitulate bulk transcriptome complexity.