Single-cell temporal transcriptomics from tiny cytoplasmic biopsies

In a recent issue in Nature, Chen et al. present Live-seq, a single-cell transcriptomic profiling method using picoliter scale single-cell cytoplasmic biopsies instead of complete cell lysis. Since the cells quickly recover and basically remain unaffected after the cytoplasmic extraction, the authors transform single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) from an end point to a temporal analysis platform.