Abstract
Cell is the fundamental structural and functional unit of complex multicellular organisms. Conventional methods which involve average analysis of cells in bulk populations can undermine physiologically significant cell populations, whereas analysis of cells at a single cell level may reveal unique biomarkers and other mechanisms that govern the genotype and phenotype in various physiological processes in presumed homogenous cell populations. Cellular abnormalities such as irregularities in cellular mechanisms have been linked to human aging and other major diseases including neurodegenerative, vascular, autoimmune, and cancer. Aging is a functional decline associated with various diseases in an organism, majorly arising from cellular abnormalities. Single cell analysis (SCA) which involves isolation and study of single cell proteomics, genomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics which enables research of cellular abnormalities with a molecular resolution, is gaining recognition in the research of human aging and disease. The advances in SCA are producing breakthrough information about cellular heterogeneity, disease progression, cellular microenvironment and its interactions, early diagnostics, improving precision medicine through high throughput drug screening and discovery of novel biomarkers; combinedly, these advances exhibit the potential of SCA to study of human aging and disease. Primarily, we review the role of SCA in understanding cellular mechanisms involved in aging and other major diseases including neurological, vascular, autoimmunity and cancer. Secondly, we also include review of SCA role in studying cell adhesion mechanisms which are involved in tissue development and maintenance and disease progression. Finally, SCA potential to empower precision medicine and its overall challenges along with future directions are discussed.
Highlights
All Multicellular Organisms are built on basic units called “cell”, a fundamental unit of structure, function, and organization
Research indicates that primitive life of the cell was formed in a symbiotic relationship with mitochondria, previously belived to be a separate living entity, was recently found as cell-free entity in blood which may be involved in cell-to-cell communications and other unexplored viral fragments such as retrotransposons fused into human genome; together, these features exhibit the high complexity involved in cellular mechanisms [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
Single cell analysis (SCA) of progenitor cells such as hematopoietic stem cells (HSC), endothelial progenitor cells involved in regeneration, repair and other inflammatory microenvironment can help improve the understanding in vascular diseases and reveal novel molecular markers which can be targeted for therapeutic purposes
Summary
All Multicellular Organisms are built on basic units called “cell”, a fundamental unit of structure, function, and organization. SCA is the study of individual cells isolated from various tissues and analyzed for their “Omics” profiles including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. The conventional techniques such as western blot, mass spectrometry and sequence profiling of cells for detection of biomarkers, drug treatment outcomes and other pathologically significant molecule investigation, use the average readouts of bulk cell populations which mask the underlying heterogeneity and microenvironments of the cells. SCA techniques including Atomic force microscopy, Microfluidic studies, Single cell RNA-sequence (ScRNA-seq), etc., can investigate the events occurring at a single cell level and improve recording events of individual gene expression profiles, cellular heterogeneities and other cellular activities previously unknown [1]. The small size of the cells and low amounts of analytes from cellular processes still pose great challenges in recording those events, presenting the scope for development in SCA techniques
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