PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Yong-Sheng Cheng AU - Yue Zhuo AU - Katharina Hartmann AU - Peng Zou AU - Gözde Bekki AU - Heike Alter AU - Hai-Kun Liu TI - Autonomous combinatorial color barcoding for multiplexing single molecule RNA visualization AID - 10.1101/127373 DP - 2017 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 127373 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/17/127373.1.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/17/127373.1.full AB - Single molecular fluorescence in situ hybridization (smFISH) detects RNA transcripts with spatial information and digital molecular counting. However, the broad usage of smFISH is still hindered by the complex chemical probe conjugation or microscopy set-up, especially for investigating multiple gene expression. Here we present a multiple fluorophore enzymatical labeling method (termed HuluFISH) for smFISH probes to achieve flexible combinatorial color barcoding in single hybridization step. The multiplex capacity of HuluFISH follows an exponential growth with the increase of the number of fluorophore types. We demonstrate that this method can be used to detect cellular heterogeneity in embryonic mouse brain on single cell level.