A new technique represents an important step forward for single-cell RNA sequencing, an advancing field of genomics that provides detailed insights into individual cells and makes it possible to distinguish between different cell types and to study disease mechanisms at the level of individual cells.

CITE-seq, or Cellular Indexing of Transcriptomes and Epitopes by sequencing, couples the measurement of surface protein markers on thousands of single cells with simultaneous sequencing of the messenger RNA (mRNA or transcriptomes) of those same single cells.