A single-cell transcriptome atlas of the human pancreas

Scientists at the Hubrecht Institute have managed to create a single cell transcriptome atlas of the human pancreas. Using a robotic platform, the scientists sequenced thousands of pancreatic cells and determined the transcriptomics signature of each individual cell type. This was used to find new cell type-specific genes and markers that enable the purification of several pancreatic cell types. The study is published on the website of Cell Systems this week.

To understand how an organ functions (and how it sometimes fails) it is important to know of which cell types it consists. This is particularly challenging for human tissues like the pancreas, mostly due to the lack of reliable cell type markers. Led by the groups of Alexander van Oudenaarden, director of the Hubrecht Institute, and  Eelco de Koning, scientists developed a high throughput robotics platform to perform single-cell mRNA sequencing of thousands of human pancreatic cells.

The StemID algorithm was able to detect all cell types that are known to be present in the pancreas in an unbiased manner based on the transcriptomes of these cells. This is a crucial step forward for characterizing not only the abundant, but also the rare cells that comprise the islets of Langerhans containing the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. Studying the human pancreas at single-cell resolution it was possible to find subpopulations of acinar and beta cells, as well as novel cell type-specific transcription factors. Furthermore, they found cell-surface markers that can be used to purify the different pancreatic cell types from after cell dispersion of the organ. This purification will help to set up experiments to evaluate the functional significance of these cells.

This data is very useful to understand the transcriptional composition of all pancreatic cell types, which is in turn valuable information to find novel therapeutic targets in the treatment of different diseases related to the exocrine or endocrine pancreas such as diabetes mellitus.

Online article: http://www.cell.com/cell-systems/fulltext/S2405-4712(16)30292-7