Functional profiling of stage-specific proteome and translational transition across human pre-implantation embryo development at a single-cell resolution
Yujiao Dang, Zhu Liu, Peng Yuan, Qiang Liu, Qianying Guo, Xi Chen, Shuaixin Gao, Xiao Liu, Shushen Ji, Yifeng Yuan, Ying Lian, Rong Li, Liying Yan, Catherine C. L. Wong, Jie Qiao
Abstract
Pre-implantation development is the first step in giving rise to a new life. The landscape of epigenomic 1 , 2 and transcriptomic 3 , 4 regulation during human pre-implantation development has been mapped by applying single-cell sequencing. In contrast, investigations of the embryonic proteome are severely limited due to the insufficiency of precious human embryonic samples for traditional mass spectrometry (MS). The technology for the single-cell proteomics (SCP) has lagged behind single-cell sequencing due to protein loss during pretreatment and impossible amplification of peptides in MS. During the stages of pre-implantation development, the size of a single cell reduces from ~120 µm of an oocyte to ~15 µm of a blastomere in a blastocyst 4 , 5 . The quantity of corresponding proteins decreases from 100 ng to ~100 pg 6 . This creates great technical challenges for proteomic investigation on human embryos.