Molecular profiling of physiologically-defined neuronal types

We report an approach called physiological optical tagging sequencing (PhOTseq), a technique for tagging cells based on their functional properties and then harvesting them for RNA sequencing. We demonstrate that PhOTseq is capable of selecting physiologically rare ( < 0.2%) cell types and enriching them by nearly one hundred-fold. After calcium imaging, physiologically-distinct cell types were photo-tagged. These cells were collected by FACS and subjected to single cell RNA sequencing. We collected cells from five physiologically-distinct cell types. Non-tagged cells were also collected as controls.