Abstract
Our single-cell transcriptome technology was ranked as No.1 on both accuracy scores and overall scores in an international benchmarking of the Human Cell Atlas project, where 25 research teams participated from 7 countries and the results were published in the Nature Biotechnology (Mereu et al. 2020). We also developed high-throughput bulk transcriptome technology which can analyze a large variety of bulk samples simultaneously at less than a tenth the cost of existing technology such as microarray or RNA sequencing. Whole transcriptome based phenotypic drug discovery become more important to analyze drug efficacy to cells on genome-wide basis recently. As it can detect influences of drugs on pathways in cells comprehensively, we can select compounds with novel mechanism while evaluating drug efficacy and toxicity, as well as extrapolating drug target pathways and mechanisms. In 2018, previous study reported whole transcriptome-based drug screening technology, “DRUG-seq” in the Nature Communications (Ye et al. 2018). As a demonstration, we compared gene detection capability of our bulk transcriptome technology with that of “DRUG-seq”, by conducting comparable experiments under the same conditions. While the DRUG-seq detected 10,000 genes by sequencing of 2.17 million reads, our technology detected almost the same number of genes by sequencing only 0.23 million reads. It showed our bulk technology can analyze 10 times more compounds in 1 run of the next generation sequencer.
