Tracing the early cell divisions of mouse embryos by single cell RNA-Seq

Abstract

The identity and function of a cell is determined by its entire RNA component, which is called the transcriptome of a cell. The transcriptome is the functional readout of the genome and epigenome. In an organism, essentially every cell has the same genome, while every cell type and potentially each individual cell has a unique transcriptome. Ideally, the transcriptome analysis should capture the exact quantity of all full length RNAs of all classes at single-base resolution in the smallest functional unit of an organism, an individual cell. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.