Toxicology

Why settle for the average answers offered by bulk analysis when you can interrogate toxicity at single-cell resolution?

Toxicology, the “science of safety”, is concerned with the detection, nature, effects, treatment, and prevention of harm to living organisms and the environment. Whether the hazard is a chemical substance, biological toxin, or the off-target effects of CRISPR-based gene editing, sensitive detection of subtle intracellular changes and precise identification of perturbed cell populations greatly facilitate the elucidation of toxicity pathways and enable more effective mitigation strategies.

Advances in single-cell isolation techniques, next-generation sequencing, and bioinformatic analysis are enabling precision toxicology, thereby overcoming the limitations of traditional bulk analysis methods. Whilst single-cell RNA-seq is increasingly applied in toxicological studies, routine use of single-cell DNA analysis has been hampered by the lack of reliable whole-genome amplification (WGA) methods.

BioSkryb’s robust single-cell WGA technology (PTA) and powerful bioinformatics platform (BaseJumper™) enables accurate profiling of mutations induced by chemical or environmental mutagens within and between individual cells. The improved data quality and scalability of PTA also makes it possible to assess both on- and off-target gene editing events across an entire genome at single-cell resolution.