BD Life Sciences, a segment of BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), a leading global medical technology company, and Cellular Research, an innovative company focused on enabling high-resolution biology, announced that they will be jointly promoting their unique solutions for highly multiplexed cell isolation and single-cell gene expression analysis.

The companies are promoting BD's powerful BD FACS single-cell sorting instrumentation and software with Cellular Research's Precise assays based on Molecular Indexing technology to offer customers an integrated workflow for measuring both nucleic acid and protein expression in cellular subtypes.

"We believe that this combination of unique capabilities, Molecular Indexing of genetic markers from Cellular Research and single-cell sorting using protein markers from BD, will significantly increase the ability to identify and analyze cell populations for basic and clinical research," said Stephen Fodor, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Cellular Research.

Cellular Research has developed Precise, a highly multiplexed molecular and sample barcoding technology, whereby each transcript in each plated cell is uniquely barcoded during incorporation into one sequencing library. Precise encoding plates can also be multiplexed, enabling up to 4,608 single cells to be prepared into one single sequencing library and reaction.

The combined workflow enables cells to be individually sorted into 96- or 384- well Precise encoding plates using the BD FACS instruments and software. "Today's announcement represents an exciting step forward for researchers engaged in single-cell genomic analysis," said Claude Dartiguelongue, Worldwide President, BD Biosciences. "The efficiency of identifying and isolating single cells greatly increases the throughput of cells available for transcriptome analysis, creating the potential, now within reach of investigators, to analyze gene expression targets in many thousands of individual cells."

Initial results and findings presented during the 16th annual Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting held in Marco Island, Florida, February 25-28. The presentation is titled: "A Comprehensive High Throughput Single Cell Analysis Workflow Combining Proteomic and Genomic Information:  Flow sorting, single cell tagging, molecular barcoding, library preparation, and sequencing analysis."