Prado Lopez, S. (2023). Single-Cell Sequencing in Cancer Research: Challenges and Opportunities. In N. Rezaei (Ed.), Handbook of Cancer and Immunology: Vol. Cham (pp. 1–28). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80962-1_143-1
The single-cell field opens the door to understanding with an unprecedented level of detail how cancer arises, evolves, and responds to therapy. But tumoral masses are formed by millions of cells with distinct phenotypic and genotypic features. Indeed, the tumoral environment and structure play a role in the cancer cells’ behavior. Different microenvironments exist within a tumor, and also the tumoral cells interact with different environmental conditions when traveling and nesting in other tissues during metastasis. This means that to have a complete view of the disease dynamics, we need to integrate the individual cell’s genome, transcriptome, proteome, and environmental data. The sequencing field has advanced greatly in the last decades, making it possible to obtain genomic data faster and at more reduced cost. Also, multiple approaches from single-cell isolation, characterization, genetic material isolation, amplification, and sequencing library preparation came into place. In addition, there are new methods for the single-cell proteome analysis. Besides, new computational approaches to analyze and integrate the gigantic amount of data generated from single cells are developing. Despite all the big advances, there is still a long way to go, and the techniques and methods for single-cell study still need to be improved to some extent. In this book chapter, we will describe the main protocols and technologies employed to obtain and sequence whole genomes from individual cells and also how single-cell data can improve our understanding about tumoral heterogeneity and cancer biology. We pretend to give the reader a general idea about the main applications, strengths, and weaknesses of the existing single-cell whole genome approaches.
