Single cell Iso-Sequencing enables rapid genome annotation for scRNAseq analysis

Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) is a powerful technique that continues to expand across various biological applications. However, incomplete 3' UTR annotations in less developed or non-model systems can impede single cell analysis resulting in genes that are partially or completely uncounted. Performing scRNAseq with incomplete 3' UTR annotations can impede the identification of cell identities and gene expression patterns and lead to erroneous biological inferences. We demonstrate that performing single cell isoform sequencing (ScISOr-Seq) in tandem with scRNAseq can rapidly improve 3' UTR annotations. Using threespine stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus), we show that gene models resulting from a minimal embryonic ScISOr-Seq dataset retained 26.1% greater scRNAseq reads than gene models from Ensembl alone. Furthermore, pooling our ScISOr-Seq isoforms with a previously published adult bulk Iso-Seq dataset from stickleback, and merging the annotation with the Ensembl gene models, resulted in a marginal improvement (+0.8%) over the ScISOr-Seq only dataset. In addition, isoforms identified by ScISOr-Seq included thousands of new splicing variants. The improved gene models obtained using ScISOr-Seq lead to successful identification of cell types and increased the reads identified of many genes in our scRNAseq stickleback dataset. Our work illuminates ScISOr-Seq as a cost-effective and efficient mechanism to rapidly annotate genomes for scRNAseq.