Cellular Research introduces a novel mRNA detection and digital quantitation system
Molecular Indexing™ enables direct and digital detection of individual mRNA molecules in single cells or rare samples. Molecular Indexing™ technology eliminates sampling error, amplification bias and external controls. The same sample can be repeatedly analyzed and compared across multiple platforms with no sample degradation.
What is Molecular Indexing™ ?
The Molecular Indexing™ technology is based on a stochastic labeling process, which occurs before amplification of the sample of interest. Proprietary Poly-T tagged Molecular Index barcodes are used to label every mRNA molecule in the sample individually during the reverse transcription step. Since each synthesized cDNA molecule is encoded with a Molecular Index label, it can be tracked through downstream processing, and PCR biases can be corrected. PCR amplification is used to amplify targets of interest after Molecule Indexing, thereby increasing the concentration of target molecules and removing any concentration based detection limits. This post labeling amplification also serves to virtually immortalize the original sample by creating an abundant sampling pool of the targets of interest. Post amplification, the number of Molecular Index labels contained in the PCR product is detected on the Pixel16 consumable by the Pixel Instrument, revealing the number of copies of the original mRNA target in the starting sample.