Electroporation for Single-Cell Analysis

Abstract

Single-cell analysis is a powerful technique to understand cell to cell or cell to environment behaviors. It can provide detailed information of cell proliferation, differentiation, and different responses to external stimuli and intracellular reactions. For single cell analysis, electroporation or electropermeabilization is an efficient and fast method, where high external electric field is applied on cell membrane to form transient membrane pores to deliver ions or molecules in or out of the cell. Conventional electroporation or bulk electroporation (BEP) is performed in a batch mode with millions of cells in suspension, which can only provide an average value. Since the last decade, microfabricated devices have been developed to perform single cell electroporation, where electric field is only intense on a single cell, resulting in high transfection efficiency with high cell viability compared to BEP. Single cell analysis using electroporation technique can be performed with microfabricated electrode arrays, carbon fiber microelectrodes, micropipettes or electrolyte-filled capillaries-based devices. Recently developed nanofabricated electrodes can realize localized single cell electroporation for delivery of different molecules with high transfection efficiency and high cell viability. Thus, single cell electroporation technique opens up the new window for the manipulation of genomics, proteomics, trascriptomics, metabolomics, or fluxomics at single cell level. This chapter emphasizes the recent advancement of electroporation technique for cellular delivery and the analysis method which might be potentially applicable for biological research and therapeutic applications.