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With the maturation of big data, whole-genome sequencing, and other expansive investigations, it can sometimes feel like researchers have traded in their microscopes for macroscopes. But this year’s Top 10 Innovations competition tells a different story: that of a single cell.
Many of the exciting laboratory tools that our independent panel of judges (whose bios and comments on each of the Top 10 products you’ll find below) selected for this year’s winning crop are geared toward prying open individual cells to access the data contained in their DNA, RNA, and/or proteins. The advantage of capturing these reams of biological information on the level of a single cell is revealing the variety within tissues not detectable in pooled samples. In cancer research, for example, such analyses may allow scientists to more accurately characterize tumor heterogeneity by sampling several thousand rapidly dividing cells on an individual basis to ...
