In the field of cellular biology, single-cell analysis is the study of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics at the single cell level.[1][2] Due to the heterogeneity seen in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cell populations, analyzing a single cell makes it possible to discover mechanisms not seen when studying a bulk population of cells.[3] Technologies such as fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) allow the precise isolation of selected single cells from complex samples, while high throughput single cell partitioning technologies,[4][5][6] enable the simultaneous molecular analysis of hundreds or thousands of single unsorted cells; this is particularly useful for the analysis of transcriptome variation in genotypically identical cells, allowing the definition of otherwise undetectable cell subtypes.