Finding needles in a haystack: dissecting tumor heterogeneity with single-cell transcriptomic and chromatin accessibility profiling

Abstract

Tumor evolution often results in a wealth of heterogeneous cancer cell types within a single tumor - heterogeneity that can include epigenetic and gene expression changes that are impossible to identify from histological features alone. The invasion of cancer cells into nearby healthy tissue, accompanied by the infiltration of responding immune cells, results in an even more complex architecture of tumor and non-tumor cells. However, bulk genomics-based methods can only assay the aggregate transcriptomic and epigenetic profiles across all of this rich cellular diversity. Such bulk averaging hides small subpopulations of tumor cells with unique phenotypes that might result in therapeutic resistance or metastatic progression. The advent of single-cell-based genomics assays for measuring transcription and chromatin accessibility - particularly scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq - has enabled the dissection of cell-types within tumors at a scale and resolution capable of unraveling the epigenetic and gene expression programs of rare and unique cellular subpopulations. This Review focuses on recent advances in scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq technologies and their application to cancer biology in the context of furthering our understanding of tumor heterogeneity.