GSE161975
Comprehensive benchmarking of single cell RNA sequencing technologies for characterizing cellular perturbation systems
Technological advances in transcriptome sequencing of single cells provided an unprecedented view on tissue composition and cellular heterogeneity. While several studies have compared different single cell RNA-seq methods with respect to data quality and their ability to distinguish cellular  subpopulations, none of these comparative studies investigated the heterogeneity of the cellular transcriptional response upon a chemical perturbation. In this study, we evaluated the transcriptional response of NGP neuroblastoma cells upon nutlin-3 treatment using the C1, ddSeq and Chromium single cell systems. These systems and library preparation methods are representative for the wide variety of platforms, ranging from microfluids chips to droplet-based systems and from full transcript sequencing to 3' end sequencing. In parallel, we used bulk RNA-seq for molecular characterization of the transcriptional response. Two complementary metrics to evaluate performance were applied: the first is the number and identification of differentially expressed genes as robustly assessed by two statistical models, and the second is enrichment analysis of biological signals, which is independent of sample size or number of cells evaluated. Where relevant, we downsampled sequencing library size, selected cell subpopulations based on specific RNA abundance features, or created pseudobulk samples to make the data more comparable. While the C1 detects the highest number of genes per cell and better resembles bulk RNA-seq, the Chromium identifies most differentially expressed genes, albeit still substantially fewer than bulk RNA-seq. Gene set enrichment analyses reveals that detection of the most abundant genes in single cell RNA-seq experiments is sufficient for molecular phenotyping. Finally, single cell RNA-seq reveals a heterogeneous response of NGP cells upon nutlin-3 treatment, pinpointing putative late-responders or resistant cells, hidden in bulk RNA-seq experiments. Overall design: Samples were synchronized using serum starvation followed by treatment with Nutlin-3 or ethanol for 24 hours. Single cell RNA-seq was performed using the ddseq device.