title: The potential of single-cell profiling in plants.
abstract: Single-cell transcriptomics has been employed in a growing number of animal studies, but the technique has yet to be widely used in plants. Nonetheless, early studies indicate that single-cell RNA-seq protocols developed for animal cells produce informative datasets in plants. We argue that single-cell transcriptomics has the potential to provide a new perspective on plant problems, such as the nature of the stem cells or initials, the plasticity of plant cells, and the extent of localized cellular responses to environmental inputs. Single-cell experimental outputs require different analytical approaches compared with pooled cell profiles and new tools tailored to single-cell assays are being developed. Here, we highlight promising new single-cell profiling approaches, their limitations as applied to plants, and their potential to address fundamental questions in plant biology.
authors.affiliation: The Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, Department of Biology, New York University, New York, NY, 10003, USA.|Present address: The Robert H. Smith Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture, The Hebrew University, Rehovot, 76100, Israel.
authors.forename: Idan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Efroni
authors.affiliation: The Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, Department of Biology, New York University, New York, NY, 10003, USA. ken.birnbaum@nyu.edu.
authors.forename: Kenneth D
authors.initials: KD
authors.lastname: Birnbaum
mesh_terms: D030541:Databases, Genetic; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods*; D018506:Gene Expression Regulation, Plant; D010940:Plant Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D010944:Plants / Q000235:genetics*; D017423:Sequence Analysis, RNA / Q000379:methods*; D059010:Single-Cell Analysis / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D010940:Plant Proteins