Single-Cell Multimodal Analytical Approach by Integrating Raman Optical Tweezers and RNA Sequencing

Single-cell analysis has become a state-of-art approach to heterogeneity profiling in tumor cells. Herein, we realize a kind of single-cell multimodal analytical approach by combining single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) with Raman optical tweezers (ROT), a label-free single-cell identification and isolation technique, and apply it to investigate drug sensitivity. The drug sensitivity of human BGC823 gastric cancer cells toward different drugs, paclitaxel and sodium dichloroacetate, was distinguished in the conjoint analytical way including morphology monitoring, Raman identification, and transcriptomic profiling. Each individual BGC823 cancer cell was measured by Raman spectroscopy, then nondestructively isolated out by ROT, and finally RNA-sequenced. Our results demonstrate each analytical mode can reflect cell response to the drugs from different perspectives and is consistent and complementary with each other. Therefore, we believe the multimodal analytical approach offers an access to comprehensive characterizations of the unicellular complexity, which especially makes sense for studying tumor heterogeneity or a desired special cell from a mixture cell sample such as whole blood.