Single-Cell Transcriptomics: Current Methods and Challenges in Data Acquisition and Analysis

Rapid cost drops and advancements in next-generation sequencing have made profiling of cells at individual level a conventional practice in scientific laboratories worldwide. Single-cell transcriptomics [single-cell RNA sequencing (SC-RNA-seq)] has an immense potential of uncovering the novel basis of human life. The well-known heterogeneity of cells at the individual level can be better studied by single-cell transcriptomics. Proper downstream analysis of this data will provide new insights into the scientific communities. However, due to low starting materials, the SC-RNA-seq data face various computational challenges: normalization, differential gene expression analysis, dimensionality reduction, etc. Additionally, new methods like 10× Chromium can profile millions of cells in parallel, which creates a considerable amount of data. Thus, single-cell data handling is another big challenge. This paper reviews the single-cell sequencing methods, library preparation, and data generation. We highlight some of the main computational challenges that require to be addressed by introducing new bioinformatics algorithms and tools for analysis. We also show single-cell transcriptomics data as a big data problem.