Depletion of 16S ribosomal RNA improves single-cell RNA-seq of planarians by DASH

Single-cell transcriptomics (scRNA-seq) has revolutionized our understanding of cell types and states in various contexts, such as development and disease. Most methodology relies on poly(A) enrichment to selectively capture protein-coding polyadenylated transcripts, intending to exclude ribosomal transcripts that constitute >80% of the transcriptome. However, it is common for ribosomal transcripts to sneak into the library, which can add significant background by flooding libraries with irrelevant sequences. The challenge of amplifying all RNA transcripts from a single cell has motivated the development of new technologies to optimize retrieval of transcripts of interest. This problem is notable in planarians, where we find that 16S ribosomal transcripts were widely enriched (20-80%) across single-cell methods. Therefore, we adapted the Depletion of Abundant Sequences by Hybridization (DASH) to the standard 10X scRNA-seq protocol. We designed single-guide RNAs tiling the 16S sequence for CRISPR-mediated degradation, and subsequently generated untreated and DASH-treated datasets from the same libraries to enable a side-by-side comparison of the effects of DASH. DASH specifically removes 16S sequences without off-target removal of other genes. By assessing the cell barcodes shared by both libraries, DASH-treated cells have consistently higher complexity given the same amount of reads, which allows the detection of a rare cell cluster and more differentially expressed genes. In conclusion, DASH can be easily integrated into existing sequencing protocols and customized to deplete any unwanted transcripts. Overall design: Planarian stem cells were isolated by Fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) by cell cycle analysis. 10X Chromium was used to generate 3'scRNA-seq, and DASH was used to deplete 16S rRNA. Untreated and DASH-treated sample were sequnced by assessing impact of DASH.