Link phenotypic characteristics with gene expression profile of single cells at high throughput for drug discovery and cell therapy development

PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT Researchers have shown substantial interest in the integration of phenomics and transcriptomics data for novel biological insights since phenotypic characteristics are highly correlated with gene expression patterns. However, there is a lack of an efficient approach that could link gene expression profiles to cellular phenotypes (e.g., protein abundance and localization, cellular morphology, enzymatic and metabolic activity) at single-cell level in a high-throughput manner. To bridge this gap, WellSIM proposes to develop a platform which can extract phenotypic characteristics from thousands of individual cells via high-content imaging and link these features with their transcriptomic profiles. This technology will not only achieve multi-dimensional single cell studies, but also improve the performance of single-cell RNA sequencing through automatic sample preparation on a microfluidic device without using barcoded beads.