STAR Protocols (Sep 2023)

Isolation and profiling of viable tumor cells from human ex vivo glioblastoma cultures through single-cell transcriptomics

  • Junyi Zhang,
  • Jakob Straehle,
  • Kevin Joseph,
  • Nicolas Neidert,
  • Simon Behringer,
  • Jonathan Göldner,
  • Andreas Vlachos,
  • Marco Prinz,
  • Christian Fung,
  • Jürgen Beck,
  • Oliver Schnell,
  • Dieter Henrik Heiland,
  • Vidhya M. Ravi

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 4, no. 3
p. 102383

Abstract

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Summary: Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) is becoming a ubiquitous method in profiling the cellular transcriptomes of both malignant and non-malignant cells from the human brain. Here, we present a protocol to isolate viable tumor cells from human ex vivo glioblastoma cultures for single-cell transcriptomic analysis. We describe steps including surgical tissue collection, sectioning, culturing, primary tumor cells inoculation, growth tracking, fluorescence-based cell sorting, and population-enriched scRNA-seq. This comprehensive methodology empowers in-depth understanding of brain tumor biology at the single-cell level.For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Ravi et al.1 : Publisher’s note: Undertaking any experimental protocol requires adherence to local institutional guidelines for laboratory safety and ethics.

Keywords