Biobanking and cryopreservation of human lung explants for omic analysis.

Abstract

Recent advances in high throughput omic technologies have greatly enhanced our knowledge of the molecular basis of complex lung diseases. In particular, with the advent of next generation sequencing, transcriptomic studies with RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) have yielded important insights into chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) [1, 2]. However, most studies to date have been performed on whole lung tissue, such that many unique cell type-specific gene expression signatures—particularly those of alveolar epithelial cells (AECs), which play a key role in COPD and IPF—may have been diluted, if not missed altogether. Single-cell RNA-seq is rapidly gaining momentum as a strategy to profile individual cells [3, 4], but sequencing depth is typically much lower and cost much higher than that of bulk RNA-seq.