Microfluidics-based single cell sequencing: moving towards more physiological analysis

Single cell assays provide an unprecedented resource for exploring life health and disease research,and play a fun-damental role in human protein atlas(HPA)and human genome project(HGP).Heterogeneity,the central focus of single-cell analysis,is defined with the various performances on the morphology,function,composition and gene even in a same scope of cell types.Especially after avoiding the signal loss based on the average analysis,the single-cell sequencing exhibited a great potential on clonal dynamics,the elucida-tion for different cell type composition and the mapping the gene-regulatory logic of human disease.For example,the combination of single-cell chromatin sequencing and RNA sequencing could complete a gene-regulatory atlas creation and identify a crucial genomic region for human cortico-genesis[1].Single-cell RNA analysis in fibroblasts could assist to distinguish the characterization between healthy and diseased organs at a single-cell resolution[2].Meanwhile,a breakthrough on single cell three-dimensional(3D)genome measurement could detect known genome structures,which could work as an efficient tool for studying heterogeneous populations[3].In brief,the development of a single cell sequencing platform with physiological and pathological significance is attracting more attention of the scientific re-searchers.