Single cell transcriptome analysis upon MCF-7 breast cancer

Background During cancer progression, the genome and epigenome of each cancer cell mutate constantly, leading to a diverse transcriptome in a cancer tissue. Such diversity results in variations in drug response among individual cancer cells and is responsible for poor prognosis. It is therefore important to reveal the diversity in the transcriptome profiles of single cancer cells, in order to further understand how the diversified cancer cells interplay to make a cancer cell population capable of escaping immune surveillance and respond poorly to drug treatment. Materials and methods Here, we adopt the recently published single cell transcriptome (SCT) analysis protocol and evaluate its reliability using RNA- seq approach on analysis of housekeeping (HK) gene expression as a control, and describe four SCT libraries and one 5,000-cell transcriptome library generated from MCF-7 breast cancer cells. Results