Picking The Right Technology, Part II

In part I, we took a quick look at technologies that analyze plasma proteins, the most accessible, but noisiest and least informative about mechanism, amongst the sample types that we examine.

Here, we quickly review technologies that examine cells. These are the technologies I grew up on, so they are fun to write about.

An important note: This post focuses on technologies that study cells by the proteins they express.

*Molecular cytometry is a generic term for CITE-Seq and AbSeq.

Here's a summary chart to help you quickly evaluate the relative merits of each. A green block indicates that the technology is best for a particular category, a red box denotes that the tech is comparatively poor for that category, and a yellow box is somewhere in between.

The category "Translation to Impactful Assay" deserves a little more discussion. I'm thinking of this in terms of how easily the assay can be translated for work in a large clinical trial or for a clinical test/companion diagnostic. Flow cytometry is readily available everywhere, and generally a conventional or spectral high parameter panel can be reduced to a simpler panel easily. A marker of interest from a molecular cytometry can be easily translated into a qPCR assay (for an mRNA target) or a simple cytometry assay for a protein target. Mass cytometry is not as easily available as flow cytometry, and - in my experience, your mileage may vary - translating a mass cytometry panel into a flow cytometry panel sometimes is tough for proteins expressed on the cell surface. That's why I gave the corresponding cell a slightly less than green score.