Bisulfite-free epigenomics and genomics of single cells analyzed by methylation sensitive restriction (epi-gSCAR)

Single-cell multi-omics are powerful means to study cell-to-cell heterogeneity. Here, we present a single-tube, bisulfite-free method for the simultaneous, genome-wide analysis of DNA methylation and genetic variants in single cells: epigenomics and genomics of single cells analyzed by restriction (epi-gSCAR). By applying this method, we obtained DNA methylation measurements of up to 506,063 CpGs and up to 1,244,188 single-nucleotide variants from single leukemia-derived cells. We demonstrate that epi-gSCAR generates accurate and reproducible measurements of DNA methylation and allows to differentiate between two cell lines based on the DNA methylation and genetic profiles. DNA methylation and gene variant analysis of 27 single Kasumi-1 and 20 single OCI-AML3 AML cells