Ummm....if this is real it could be enormous for a field or two!
Yesterday I was reading another paper in this issue of Analytical Chemistry that I was excited (and very skeptical about) and I got to the end before I realized there were no files to support some very lofty claims. I was already really mad about some dumb shit my country was up to and I guess the reviewers and editors were just like - meh - whatever, this is going to be super controversial, so we'll just let you push it through without showing any work. That paper will not feature here.
This one will because I've totally got all their RAW files now! (There's only 14! But there is proof they did something!)
What was it? They built microchannels so they could TMT label single cell digests in a high throughput manner! Does it look like a pain in the butt? Totally. OMG. It totally looks like no fun at all. But have you seen how crazy DropSeq is (how they label cells for single cell RNASeq)? It's crazy. You eventually get flow rate A and flow rate B under a microscope to line up and the bubbles join and then you can do like 10 million of them while you're at lunch or whatever.
This is a step in the right direction. Now....because I'm a jerk and I do have these files, they do look a little weird.
This should be 1 cell, 1 cell, 1 cell, 1 cell, 1 cell, 1 cell, 1 cell, 1 cell, blank, 1 cell, 50 cells of each cell type (100 cells).
I've scanned through few thousand MS/MS spectra and while they look pretty consistent the ratios appear to be off. Good example.
It's very rare that I land on a spectrum that I expect... one cell is 2e4 and 100 cells is 2e6, by rare, I'm seriously talking about less than 1%. I'll probably queue them up for reprocessing in a second, of course, so I'll have real numbers. There is some level of error intrinsic in just scanning with your finger on the forward arrow key.
I'm sure the reviewers for such a nice journal looked at this already and were satisfied with it, so I bet I'm missing something. Right now I'm missing the last bit of sunshine to take my trash out to the curb, so I'm can't spend more time on it. Pittsburgh stairs can be steep and dangerous in the dark. Mine are no exception.
Again, if this is real, it could be really really cool and that's how we should think about every paper we read, right? I'm just personally invested in processes to speed up my single cell labeling and I don't want to get financially invested in something without being super duper skeptical. Please interpret my words and effort implied in this post in that light, because I wouldn't post anything about this paper if I didn't like it.