Single-Cell Analysis Approaches in Cartilage Diseases Diagnosis and Therapies

Substantial evidence shows that major breakthrough toward cartilage therapeutic approaches is largely hampered by the low chondrocytes yield along with hetero-geneous off-target differentiation of cells during chondrogenesis. Therefore, a complete assessment of an individual cell is essential for exhaustive comprehen-sion of cell-to-cell variability. Nowadays, advances in stem cell biology have empowered the characterization of individual cells and biological mechanisms at the single-cell level. Single-cell analysis technologies represent the ultimate frontier of the transcriptomic landscape of thousands of single cells and revolutionize our understanding of cartilage tissue during normal homeostasis and diseases. Novel technologies like microfluidics and CRISPR/Cas9 technol-ogy are valuable for single-cell omics analysis due to their sensitivity and accuracy. In this chapter, we first present the single-cell profiling of mesenchymal stem cell heterogeneity. Next, we discuss the recent progress in single-cell genomics, epigenomics, and proteomics sequencing technologies. The single-cell multi-omics approaches associated with genomics, transcriptomics, proteo-mics, as well as epigenomics are reviewed to identify cellular subpopulations that drive the disease. We also address their applications in biomarker discovery, personalized medicine, and regenerative medicine with the focus on cartilage tissue.