Monthly Archives: April 2018

After months of living under the looming threat of “Day Zero”, Cape Town has tentatively pushed back the deadline of extreme water crisis for the remainder of the year. Day Zero, which had originally been scheduled for April 22, reflects the date when water levels in the city's major dams reaches 13.5% of their capacity. If this day arrived, taps would be shut off and Cape Town residents would need to stand in line to pick up their 25-liter daily ration of water.¹ For perspective, this equivalent to the amount of water consumed in a four-minute shower.²

Drought-driven water shortages are a worldwide crisis. The cities at highest risk to run out of water include Jakarta (where the city is sinking from illegal groundwater extraction as sea levels around it rise), Mexico City (where taps are already turned off for many city citizens for parts of the day), Tokyo, London, and Miami.³ In California, almost 50% of the state is currently experiencing moderate drought.⁴

Cape Town is South Africa’s

The Seq-Well protocol uses PCTE membranes in an innovative platform for rapid single-cell transcriptomics. This powerful tool in the world of clinical discovery offers a precise snapshot of cellular behavior.

As the product of a joint research venture between the Shalek and Love groups at MIT, this portable device combines single-cell sequencing with microfluidics technology. The system enables researchers to study RNA transcripts present in numerous individual cells at a given point in time. Thousands of cells undergo parallel RNA sequencing for thousands of genes, yielding large sets of data that indicate patterns in gene expression. For example, data collected by the developers of this technology has been used to implicate basal cellular heterogeneity in individual tuberculosis responses.¹

In the Seq-Well system, a nanowell array captures single cells for sequencing. These wells are protected by a semipermeable membrane, which allows for lysis chemicals to pass through but retains the