When Alex Rosenberg, PhD, and Charlie Roco, PhD, were graduate students in Georg Seelig’s lab at the University of Washington, they drew out their idea for how to increase the scalablility of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) on a whiteboard. At that time, roughly five years ago, “large scale was about 100 cells,” said Rosenberg. They developed their idea into the technique known as Split Pool Ligation-based Transcriptome sequencing (SPLiT-seq).
According to Rosenberg, the emails started rolling in as soon as the proof-of-concept paper was published in Science in 2018. A “huge number” of groups reached out, he said, asking how to set up SPLiT-seq in their own labs.