Fluidigm’s C1 system is encased in a benchtop machine that automatically orchestrates the steps of Smart-seq, taking your cell suspension and isolating and lysing cells, reverse transcribing their mRNA, and amplifying the resulting cDNA. It requires nonreusable microfluidic array chips that analyze 96 cells. Amplified cDNA is then sequenced or detected using qPCR. Switching mechanism at 5′ end of the RNA transcript (Smart-seq) is one of the only sequencing protocols that allows you to generate full-length coverage of transcriptomes from single cells, which is important if you’re studying allele-specific gene expression or splice variants.
Read more