Cell
lines are applied on a large scale in the field of biomedicine,
but they are susceptible to issues such as misidentification and cross-contamination.
This situation is becoming worse over time due to the rapid growth
of the biomedical field, and thus there is an urgent need for a more
effective strategy to address the problem. As described herein, a
cell coding method is established based on two types of uniform and
stable glycan nanoparticles that are synthesized using the graft-copolymerization-induced
self-assembly (GISA) method, which further exhibit distinct fluorescent
properties due to elaborate modification with fluorescent labeling
molecules. The different affinity between each nanoparticle and various
cell lines results in clearly distinguishable differences in their
endocytosis degrees, thus resulting in distinct characteristic fluorescence
intensities. Through flow cytometry measurements, the specific signals
of each cell sample can be recorded and turned into a map divided
into different regions by statistical processing. Using this sensing
array strategy, we have successfully identified six human cell lines,
including one normal type and five tumor types. Moreover, cell contamination
evaluation of different cell lines with HeLa cells as the contaminant
in a semiquantitative analysis has also been successfully achieved.
Notably, the whole process of nanoparticle fabrication and fluorescent
testing is facile and the results are highly reliable.