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Cryopreservation of human cancers conserves tumour heterogeneity for single-cell multi-omics analysis

ABSTRACT: Background: High throughput single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-Seq) has emerged as a powerful tool for exploring cellular heterogeneity amongst complex human cancers. scRNA-Seq studies using fresh human surgical tissue is logistically difficult, precludes histopathological triage of samples and limits the ability to perform batch processing. This hinderance can often introduce technical biases when integrating patient datasets and increase experimental costs. Although tissue preservation methods have been previously explored to address such issues, it is yet to be examined on complex human tissues, such as solid cancers, and on high throughput scRNA-Seq platforms. Results: We show that the viable cryopreservation of human cancers provides high quality single-cell transcriptomes using the Chromium 10X platform. We sequenced a total of ~120,000 cells from fresh and cryopreserved replicates across three breast cancers, two prostate cancers and a cutaneous melanoma. Importantly, tumour heterogeneity identified from fresh tissues was largely conserved in cryopreserved replicates. We show that sequencing of single cells prepared from cryopreserved tissue fragments or from cryopreserved cell suspensions is comparable to sequenced cells prepared from fresh tissue, with cryopreserved cell suspensions displaying higher correlations with fresh tissue in gene expression. We showed that cryopreservation had minimal impacts on results of downstream analyses such as biological pathway enrichment. For some tumours, cryopreservation modestly increased cell stress signatures compared to freshly analysed tissue. Further, we demonstrate the advantage of cryopreserving whole-cells for immunophenotyping methods such as CITE-Seq, which is impossible using other preservation methods such as single nuclei-sequencing. Conclusions: Our study guides new experimental designs for tissue biobanking for future clinical single-cell RNA sequencing studies.

PROVIDER: EGAS00001005115 | EGA |

REPOSITORIES: EGA

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Project description:Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) matrix biomarkers have become increasingly valuable surrogate markers of neuropsychiatric diseases in research and clinical practice. In contrast, CSF cells have been rarely investigated due to their relative scarcity and fragility, and lack of common collection and cryopreservation protocols, with limited exceptions for neurooncology and primary immune-based diseases like multiple sclerosis. The advent of a microfluidics-based multi-omics approaches to studying individual cells has allowed for the study of cellular phenotyping, intracellular dynamics, and intercellular relationships that provide multidimensionality unable to be obtained through acellular fluid-phase analyses. challenges to cell-based research include site to- site differences in handling, storage, and thawing methods, which can lead to inaccuracy and inter-assay variability. In the present study, we performed single-cell RNA sequencing (10x Genomics) on fresh (Samples labeled as FRE) or previously cryopreserved human CSF samples from three alternative cryopreservation methods: Fetal Bovine Serum with Dimethyl sulfoxide (FBS/DMSO, Samples labeled as FBS), FBS/DMSO after a DNase step (a step often included in epigenetic studies, samples labeled as DNA), and cryopreservation using commercially available Recovery©media (Samples labeled as REC). In comparing relative differences between fresh and cryopreserved samples, we found little effect of the cryopreservation method on being able to resolve donor-linked cell type proportions, markers of cellular stress, and overall gene expression at the single-cell level, whereas donor-specific differences were readily discernable. We further, demonstrate the compatibility of fresh and cryopreserved CSF immune cell sequencing using biologically relevant sexually dimorphic gene expression differences by donor. Our findings support the utility and interchangeability of FBS/DMSO and Recovery cryopreservation with fresh sample analysis, providing a methodological grounding that will enable researchers to further expand our understanding of the CSF immune cell contributions to neurological and psychiatric disease.

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Cryopreservation of human cancers conserves tumour heterogeneity for single-cell multi-omics analysis

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