Effects of Sample Size on Plant Single-Cell RNA Profiling

Single-cell RNA (scRNA) profiling or scRNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) makes it possible to parallelly investigate diverse molecular features of multiple types of cells in a given plant tissue and discover cell developmental processes. In this study, we evaluated the effects of sample size (i.e., cell nu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hongyu Chen, Yang Lv, Xinxin Yin, Xi Chen, Qinjie Chu, Qian-Hao Zhu, Longjiang Fan, Longbiao Guo
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-10-01
Series:Current Issues in Molecular Biology
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/43/3/119
Description
Summary:Single-cell RNA (scRNA) profiling or scRNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) makes it possible to parallelly investigate diverse molecular features of multiple types of cells in a given plant tissue and discover cell developmental processes. In this study, we evaluated the effects of sample size (i.e., cell number) on the outcome of single-cell transcriptome analysis by sampling different numbers of cells from a pool of ~57,000 <i>Arabidopsis thaliana</i> root cells integrated from five published studies. Our results indicated that the most significant principal components could be achieved when 20,000–30,000 cells were sampled, a relatively high reliability of cell clustering could be achieved by using ~20,000 cells with little further improvement by using more cells, 96% of the differentially expressed genes could be successfully identified with no more than 20,000 cells, and a relatively stable pseudotime could be estimated in the subsample with 5000 cells. Finally, our results provide a general guide for optimizing sample size to be used in plant scRNA-seq studies.
ISSN:1467-3037
1467-3045