Abstract
How cells wake up from dormancy remains enigmatic, although it has long been known that Schizosaccharomyces pombe spores break dormancy in response to glucose uptake from their environment. Expression profiling upon dormancy breaking must be a clue for the question. As RNA-seq profiles made from bulk spores may not display sufficient temporal resolution, we established a system to perform single cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) to capture the transcriptional landscape of a single spore upon dormancy breaking. scRNA-seq was performed over 64 single spores in dormancy or germination, and each single-cell transcriptome was mutually compared to predict how transcriptomes changed over time upon dormancy breaking. Thus, each transcriptome was aligned along the 'Virtual Timeline' and a histone H3 gene was highlighted as a differentially expressed gene upon dormancy breaking. The data highlighted a possibility that chromatin dramatically change in accordance with progression of germination.
