Validation of single-cell transcriptomic profiles from Illumina and MGI Tech sequencing platforms.

Different companies have developed sequencing platforms with a wide variety of strengths and drawbacks. Illumina is currently used for high-throughput and highly accurate short-read sequencing, however, other companies, such as MGI Tech, have developed a similar sequencing method at a lower cost. The accuracy, sensitivity, and reproducibility of Illumina and MGI Tech have been compared, showing high similarity. While many comparisons exist, the performance of MGI on gene expression and cell clustering for single-cell applications is unknown. In this study, we performed single-cell RNA sequencing on three human breast cancer samples to compare the cell clustering or average gene expressions for the reads generated by Illumina and MGI sequencing. We observed unique platform-specific cells detected and show that these low-quality cells appear randomly and could only affect minor cell populations. Overall design: Single cell RNA-sequencing by illumina or MGI sequencer