Microfluidic Chip-Based Live Single-Cell Probes

Abstract

Single-cell analysis provides critical information to understand key disease processes and disease diagnosis. However, nearly all of the current methods carry out single-cell analysis in suspension, which not only destroy extracellular context but also may perturb the intracellular metabolites. It is essential to develop new methods to meet the requirements of understanding individual cell behaviors and their relations in adherent tissue culture. Advances in single-cell methodologies have highlighted the single-cell biology and are opening new vistas for scientists to explore. How to realize precise operation of single cells and subcellular molecule infusion is a critical question that researchers face. And, as the technologies to study single cells expand, sophisticated analytical tools are required to make sense of various behaviors and components of single cells as well as their relations in adherent tissue culture. Microfluidic chip has been proved an outstanding approach for single-cell analysis. Recently, the developments of single-cell probes open up new avenues to operate open microfluidics to perform single-cell extraction, single-cell mass spectrometric analysis, single-cell adhesion analysis, and subcellular operations.