Fig. 2 |. Applications of scRNA-seq in cardiovascular research.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies have a wide-range of advantages over conventional bulk gene analysis techniques. In cardiovascular research, scRNA-seq is especially useful for detecting rare cell populations, reconstructing cardiovascular cell trajectory, identifying cell-to-cell interactions, understanding organ-specific or tissue-specific characteristics of vascular cells, spatial transcriptomic mapping of cardiovascular organs and for developing more effective precision medicine tools for better prediction of patient-specific drug responses. All the aforementioned applications are critical to improving our understanding of cardiovascular development, organ homeostasis and disease mechanisms by deciphering cellular heterogeneity at an unprecedented resolution. GRN, gene regulatory network; t-SNE, t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding.