Single-cell RNA profiling of glomerular cells in diabetic kidney: a step forward for understanding diabetic nephropathy

Transcriptomic profiling of kidney tissues or isolated glomeruli has been used to examine changes in the expression of multiple genes in diabetic kidney disease (1,2). Bulk tissue RNA-sequencing can quantitate the average expression of genes in a given tissue but the amount of cell type specific gene expression can only be roughly inferred by the different cell type proportions in each tissue.