Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies play an important role in understanding of complex biological systems, related to genomics and metagenomics. Now the focus of NGS-based technologies has shifted towards the characterization of individual cells for genomics, transcriptomics, or epigenomics studies. Single cell sequencing is obtaining the DNA or RNA sequence information from individual cells. Single-cell sequencing helps to better understand the cellular differences with high resolution and scale, and has greatly impacted biology and medicine. The use of single-cell sequencing and analyses help investigators to make more biological discoveries when compared with traditional profiling methods where bulk populations are analysed.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a genome-wide technique, which allows researcher to analyze all the genes that are expressed in a cell. scRNA-seq can provide answer to questions related to regulatory relationships between genes. It is a powerful tool for studying the transcriptome in an unbiased manner and require very low amount of RNA input. It helps to better understand the function of individual cells with high resolution. A large number of novel genes can be detected using single-cell mRNA sequencing and one can get a complete data set for every cell. In traditional RNA-Seq methods, RNA of an entire population of cells are analysed and a bulk average of the measurement are obtained, lacking representation of each individual cell’s transcriptome. We at MRDNA use Illumina Bio-Rad® SureCell™ Whole Transcriptome Analysis (WTA) 3’ Kit for single-cell RNA sequencing studies. scRNA-seq is an effective approach to characterize those microorganisms that are difficult to culture in-vitro. Advances in single-cell sequencing have improved the detection and analysis of infectious diseases, food-borne pathogens, and microbial diversities in the environment or the gut.