A microscopy data set of discrete spatial and temporal single molecule RNA expression in single cells

We report a comprehensive single cell dataset of spatial distributions of nuclear and cytoplasmic mRNA as a function of time. We measure mRNA expression with single molecule RNA fluorescent in-situ hybridization microscopy in the yeast model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae in tens of thousands of cells. The resulting dataset contains the discrete number of mRNA molecules in the nucleus and the cytoplasm for sixteen time points, two genes and two stress conditions each in biological duplicates or triplicates. We present these datasets as population means, fraction of cells above basal mRNA expression (ON-cells), the variance normalized by the expression mean (Fano factor), marginal probability of nuclear and cytoplasmic mRNA, and the joint probability of nuclear and cytoplasmic RNA expression. The reuse potential are in three areas: (1) development of discrete single cell modelling approaches, (2) building predictive models to study fundamental processes in transcription regulation, (3) development of single cell image processing approaches not possible with continuous, non-spatial datasets of low temporal resolution.