Live-seq: sequencing a cell without killing it

A new technique keeps cells alive during extraction to track the activity of thousands of genes across time. The breakthrough method is called Live-seq and was jointly developed by scientists at EPFL and ETH Zurich. RNA sequencing allows scientists to study the expression of genes in a cell. Since messenger RNA (mRNA) is generated from a DNA gene, that information can be used to identify the original gene sequence and thus measure the activity of thousands of genes (i.e. the transcriptome) in these cells. The challenge with RNA sequencing is to capture mRNA from a specific cell out of a mixed population - which is how most cells exist in nature. To do this, scientists have developed "single-cell RNA sequencing" (scRNA-seq), which provides unprecedented insights for basic and biomedical research, and even drug development.