RNA Sequencing Technologies at the Single Cell Level in Plants

High-throughput RNA sequencing technologies are actively used in plant biology. In the early days of its development, such analysis required large amounts of RNA to prepare a library for sequencing. As a result, analysis of gene expression at the level of individual cells was not available. Furthermore, structural features of the plant organism, such as the presence of a cell wall, the biochemical composition of the plant cell cytoplasm, and the size of plant cells, create difficulties in the application of RNA sequencing technologies at the single cell level. However, the active development of technologies in the field of high-throughput sequencing and the improvement of methodological approaches made it possible to overcome these challenges. Currently, expression atlases at the single cell level are appearing not only for model plants, but also for less popular plant objects, and their number is constantly growing. In addition, a new direction of development is technologies that allow one to analyze expression in single cells while maintaining spatial context. These new approaches have been surveyed in this review.