Integrated Microfluidic Probe for Single Cell Manipulation

In the study of single cells, maintaining spatiotemporal integrity of cells is crucial for reliable omics analysis. Most techniques utilize suspended cells which disrupts their spatial arrangement in native tissues and introduce measures of compromise in the experimental data. To this end, we have developed an integrated microfluidic probe which combines principles of electropermeabilization and hydrodynamic flow confinement for minimally-invasive biopsy of adherent cells, and potentially tissues slices. We used our probe to extract the cytoplasmic content of adherent PC3 and HeLa cells in a confluent monolayer of culture, and evaluated the expression of a target gene. We further advanced the functionality of the probe by incorporating droplet microfluidics for compartmentalization of retrieved cytoplasmic content from different cells, for potentially improving the experimental throughput of this technology.