Application progress of single-cell sequencing technology in breast cancer research

doi:10.19401/j.cnki.1007-3639.2022.07.007

Abstract

Abstract:

Breast cancer is a malignant tumor with the highest incidence in women in the world, and it represents the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women. Breast cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease, including the heterogeneity between tumors and even within the tumor microenvironment, making precise classification and treatment of the disease difficult. The application of traditional high-throughput sequencing technology in breast cancer research has provided an important reference for revealing the occurrence and development of breast cancer, driving genes, precise classification, diagnosis and treatment. However, the limitation of traditional high-throughput sequencing technology is its inability to explore heterogeneity within the tumor microenvironment. The single-cell sequencing technology emerged in recent years has been greatly improved in terms of sensitivity, accuracy and efficiency, enabling us to analyze single-cell genome information in complex mixed cells, which has shown great performance in studying tumor heterogeneity. In recent years, there are a number of important research results obtained by harnessing single-cell sequencing technology in breast cancer research, including analyzing breast cancer transcriptome at the single-cell level, exploring the heterogeneity of breast cancer microenvironment, breast cancer drug resistance mechanisms, the clonal heterogeneity and clonal evolution of breast cancer, and comprehensively mining single-cell public data resources to reveal the heterogeneity of breast cancer. This article reviewed important research in recent years regarding the application of single-cell sequencing technology in breast cancer era. We aimed to provide references for breast cancer researchers to manipulate the single-cell sequencing technology and promote the in-depth use of single-cell sequencing technology in breast cancer research.

Key words: Breast cancer, Single-cell sequencing, Heterogeneity, Tumor microenvironment

CLC Number:

R737.9

LIU Qiang, FANG Yi, WANG Jing. Application progress of single-cell sequencing technology in breast cancer research[J]. China Oncology, 2022, 32(7): 635-642.

Figures/Tables 1

References 35

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Database	Institution and website	Database feature	Reference
GEO	NCBI:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/	A public functional genomics data repository supporting MIAME-compliant data submissions.	[29]
Single Cell Expression Atlas	EMBL-EBI:https://www.ebi.ac.uk/gxa/sc/home	It sources and compiles data on the abundance and localisation of RNA and proteins in various biological systems and contexts and provides open access to this data for the research community.	[31]
Single Cell Portal	The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard:https://singlecell.broadinstitute.org/single_cell	A cloud-based, scalable web application that is organized by studies with downloadable raw data, aiming to accelerate reproducible single-cell research through	No
The Human Cell Atlas	Broad Institute:https://data.humancellatlas.org/	The HCA Data Portal stores and provides single-cell data contributed by labs around the world. Anyone can contribute data, find data, or access community tools and applications.	[32]
PanglaoDB	Karolinska Institutet:https://panglaodb.se/	A database for the scientific community interested in exploration of single cell RNA sequencing experiments from mouse and human.	[33]
scRNASeqDB	The University of Texas Health Science Center:https://bioinfo.uth.edu/scrnaseqdb/	A freely accessible online resource which incorporates 36 human single cell transcriptome data sets (174 cell groups and 8910 single cells) analyzed by scRNA-seq is provided	[34]