BioLegend licenses transcriptome tech from NY Genome Center

A technology developed at the New York Genome Center that combines protein and messenger RNA expression measurements in cells has been licensed by biotech tools company BioLegend.The San Diego-based company has taken an exclusive license to the CITE-Seq platform developed by NYGC scientist Marlon Stoeckius, Ph.D., which has been hailed as a step forward in single-cell RNA sequencing, a technique BioLegend says makes it possible to distinguish between different cell types and states and “study disease mechanisms at the level of individual cells.” CITE-Seq—which stands for Cellular Indexing of Transcriptomes and Epitopes by sequencing—was featured in a Nature Methods paper published last year and couples the measurement of surface protein markers on thousands of single cells with simultaneous sequencing of the mRNA “transcriptome” of those same cells. At the time, Stoeckius said that “no other method allows simultaneous measurements of transcriptomes and proteins on the same scale,” speeding up transcriptome analysis and expanding the number of protein markers that can be analyzed simultaneously compared to older cytometry and cell plating-based methods. CITE-Seq is based on the use of DNA-barcoded antibodies, which produce a sequenceable readout that is captured along with the transcriptome of the cell.