Rapid and sensitive single cell RNA sequencing with SHERRY2

Prevalent single cell transcriptomic profiling (scRNA-seq) mechods are mainly based on synthesis and enrichment of full-length double-stranded complementary DNA. These approaches are challenging to generate accurate quantification of transcripts when their abundance is low or their full-length amplifications are difficult. Based on our previous finding that Tn5 transposase can directly cut-and-tag DNA/RNA hetero-duplexes, we present SHERRY2, a specifically optimized protocol for scRNA-seq without second strand cDNA synthesis. SHERRY2 is free of pre-amplification and eliminates the sequence-dependent bias. In comparison with other widely-used scRNA-seq methods, SHERRY2 exhibits significantly higher sensitivity and accuracy even for single nuclei. Besides, SHERRY2 is simple and robust, and can be easily scaled up to high-throughput experiments. When testing single lymphocytes and neuron nuclei, SHERRY2 not only obtained accurate countings of transcription factors and long non-coding RNAs, but also provided bias-free results that enriched genes in specific cellular components or functions, which outperformed other protocols. With a few thousand cells sequenced by SHERRY2, we confirmed expression and dynamics of Myc in different cell types of germinal centers, which were previously only revealed by gene-specific amplification methods.