Percentage of mitochondoria in single nuclei single cellRNASeq

Question

[Tania]

Hi All

Are these percentages of mitcohondoria seems normal for single nuclei/Single Cell RNASeq? What is a normal rate? Thanks

Answer 1

[Basti]

I recommend you this paper : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8599307/ Particularly : "mtDNA% ranges from 5% or less in tissues with low energy requirements up to ∼30% in the heart due to the high energy demand of cardiomyocytes" So it depends on your tissue but your percentages are in the acceptable range.

[Tania]

Thank you Basti very much. But this is even if it is single nuclei? The paper talks about single cell? Thanks

[Basti]

You're right and I don't see any paper that studied the subject in greater depth, but I believe the percentage should be lower. An exemple here in Fig 2D : https://genomemedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13073-021-00941-8 "the percentage of mitochondrial genes sequenced in the nucleus-containing droplets was lower than the cell-containing particles (2.7% and 4.2%, respectively)" and they filtered out nuclei with >20% mitochondrial gene counts.

[Tania]

Got it. Thank you very much Basti.