Advances in Microfluidics Applied to Single Cell Operation

Abstract

The field of microbiology have traditionally been concerned with and focused on studies at the population level. Microfluidic platforms have emerged as important tools for biology research at a small scale, even down to a single cell level. The spatial and temporal control of cells and stimuli transported by microfluidic channels in well-designed microsystems realized the studies of specific cells in a controlled microenvironment. The true cellular physiology responses, which are obtained mostly by inference from population-level data, could be revealed in this way. Nowadays, significant applications like cell culture, analysis, sorting, genomics, and proteomics at the single cell level have been achieved in microfluidic chips. Highly integrated microfluidic systems with complete bio-analytic functions are also coming forth and of great promise for single cell related physiology, biomedical, and high throughput screening research. Herein, the leads of technologies applied to single cell operation are reviewed. Challenges and potentials of these works are also summarized, to highlight fields for further research.

Antimicrobial susceptibility testing: currently used methods and devices and the near future in clinical practice

“…Functionalities can even be combined. Microfluidic platforms are cheap and fast, provide accurate screening, benefit from efficient heat and mass transfer and short diffusion distances, show the potential for high throughput due to a high surface area to volume ratio, and they can be highly automated (Dai et al 2016;Schumacher et al 2018;Zhu et al 2018).…”

“…These techniques are based on microchannels, that is 10-100 µm, and the extremely small volumes of reagent and analyte in nanolitres (Zhu et al 2018) or picolitres (Hayat and El Abed 2018) can flow through the channels on one chip. The detection methods depend on the device used and vary widely, and are generally electrochemical, magnetic or optical/microcalorimetric (Schumacher et al 2018).…”

“…Owing to the small size of the chip, the method can be applied to portable devices (Dai et al 2016;Zhu et al 2018). Cira et al (2012) developed a self-loading microfluidic instrument which is a portable point-of-care device that determines the MIC with a single pipetting step.…”

Single-Cell Analysis of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus

“…Recently, microfluidic approaches for cell isolation in which cells are captured in individual droplets or nano wells for processing has been developed to meet the needs of higher throughout (Kolodziejczyk et al, 2015). Microfluidics are defined as systems based on micro-channels (10∼100 µm) and used for controlling small volume of the fluid which include several procedures (microdroplets operation, cell capture, cultivation, sensing, sorting, lysis and omics analysis) for single-cell operation (Zhu et al, 2018). On account of the ability of controlling and manipulating fluids in the range of micro to pico-liters, microfluidics has been as a platform-level and continuously evolving technology for single-cell processing and analysis (Dusny and Grunberger, 2019).…”

Physiological roles of antisense RNAs in prokaryotes

“…More recent advances have allowed the use of microfluidics to generate droplets (10 to 1000 μm). Droplets possess the advantage of being cheap and fast to produce but more importantly it is possible to control their size and to incorporate various isolated molecules or cells into them [99,100], and even heterogeneous samples like PCR products or RNAs [101]. Thus, these droplets can be used to perform in vitro experiments such as transcription or translation in order to screen new molecules by selection.…”