1. Polony gels enable amplifiable DNA stamping and spatial transcriptomics of chronic pain
- Author
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Xiaonan Fu, Li Sun, Runze Dong, Jane Y. Chen, Runglawan Silakit, Logan F. Condon, Yiing Lin, Shin Lin, Richard D. Palmiter, and Liangcai Gu
- Subjects
Mice ,Animals ,RNA ,DNA ,Chronic Pain ,Transcriptome ,Gels ,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology - Abstract
Methods for acquiring spatially resolved omics data from complex tissues use barcoded DNA arrays of low- to sub-micrometer features to achieve single-cell resolution. However, fabricating such arrays (randomly assembled beads, DNA nanoballs, or clusters) requires sequencing barcodes in each array, limiting cost-effectiveness and throughput. Here, we describe a vastly scalable stamping method to fabricate polony gels, arrays of ∼1-micrometer clonal DNA clusters bearing unique barcodes. By enabling repeatable enzymatic replication of barcode-patterned gels, this method, compared with the sequencing-dependent array fabrication, reduced cost by at least 35-fold and time to approximately 7 h. The gel stamping was implemented with a simple robotic arm and off-the-shelf reagents. We leveraged the resolution and RNA capture efficiency of polony gels to develop Pixel-seq, a single-cell spatial transcriptomic assay, and applied it to map the mouse parabrachial nucleus and analyze changes in neuropathic pain-regulated transcriptomes and cell-cell communication after nerve ligation.
- Published
- 2022
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