Extraction of nuclei from archived post-mortem tissues for single-nucleus sequencing applications

Abstract Single-cell and single-nucleus sequencing techniques are a burgeoning field with various biological, biomedical, and clinical applications. Numerous high and low-throughput methods have been developed for sequencing the RNA and DNA content of single cells. However, for all these methods the key requirement is high quality input of a single-cell or single-nucleus suspension. Preparing such a suspension is the limiting step when working with fragile, archived tissues of variable quality. This hurdle can prevent such tissues from being extensively investigated with single-cell technologies. We describe a protocol for preparing single-nucleus suspensions within the span of a few hours that reliably works for multiple post-mortem and archived tissues types using standard lab equipment. Moreover, these preparations are compatible with single-nucleus RNA-seq and ATAC-seq using the 10X Genomics’ Chromium system.