Start Monday March 21st (updated) at 4pm (CET, Berlin/Paris)
(3 pm London/Lisbon, 10am New-York, 7am San Francisco, 5pm Tel Aviv)
Main Speaker: Stefan Kirsch, Group Leader, Division of Personalized Tumor Therapy, Fraunhofer ITEM-R, Germany (Link)
Title:
Single Cell microRNA sequencing: Protocol Comparison, Automation and Application to Clinical Samples
Abstract:
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are important posttranscriptional regulators that are evolutionary very well conserved. The 20–25-nt long molecules bind to complementary regions on target mRNAs, which leads to mRNA degradation or translational repression. Over 60% of human genes contain miRNA binding sites. In pathologic conditions such as cancer, the transcription of many miRNAs is altered, which in turn changes the abundance of target mRNAs. Therefore, miRNAs have great potential as diagnostic or prognostic biomarkers. Even more, they represent promising novel drugs or therapeutic targets. However, these promising clinical applications of miRNAs require methods for the accurate and reproducible quantification of global miRNA expression. We will discuss how miRNA analysis on the single cell level provides new opportunities in the concept of liquid biopsy in cancer, enables a first glimpse into the miRNA biology of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), and potentially paves the way for exploring the biological relevance and diagnostic potential of CTC-derived miRNAs.
Short session speaker (8 minutes long):
Sarah Hücker (Post-doc)
Title: Miniaturization of single cell miRNA sequencing
Abstract:
In order to increase throughput and reduce library preparation cost, it is highly desireable to automate and miniaturize protocols. Therefore, we developed an automated and miniaturized version of our single cell miRNA sequencing protocol. The protocol allows the processing of up to 384 samples in parallel and a reduction of the reaction volume by three quarters. The amount of reads mapping to annotated miRNAs, the number of detected miRNAs and the reproducibility are comparable to the manual protocol.