In vitro culture of single cells facilitates biological studies by deconvoluting complications from cell population heterogeneity. However, there is still a lack of simple yet high-throughput methods to perform single cell culture experiments. In this paper, we report the development and application of a microfluidic device with a dual-well (DW) design concept for high-yield single-cell loading (~77%) in large microwells (285 and 485 μm in diameter) which allowed for cell spreading, proliferation and differentiation. The increased single-cell loading yield is achieved by using sets of small microwells termed "capture-wells" and big microwells termed "culture-wells" according to their utilities for single-cell capture and culture, respectively. This novel device architecture allows the size of the "culture" microwells to be flexibly adjusted without affecting the single-cell loading efficiency making it useful for cell culture applications as demonstrated by our experiments of KT98 mouse neural stem cell differentiation, A549 and MDA-MB-435 cancer cell proliferation, and single-cell colony formation assay with A549 cells in this paper.

Free-living amoebae act as environmental hosts of several intracellular pathogens. We examined the interaction between Acanthamoeba rhysodes and Salmonella, a human intracellular pathogen. There was no difference among three different serovars of Salmonella in terms of their growth within A. rhysodes over time. The number of intracellular bacteria increased at 6 h post-infection, and the viability of A. rhysodes was significantly reduced at 24 h post-infection. Amoebic cell death was characterized by TUNEL and Annexin V assay, without DNA ladder identified, indicating an apoptosis-like cell death in Salmonella-infected A. rhysodes. Global gene expression screening between intracellular and extracellular Salmonella by microarray and quantitative PCR showed that genes from Salmonella pathogenicity islands and virulence plasmid were up-regulated within A. rhysodes. The phase-dependent expression pattern suggests their distinct roles in the pathogenesis. A. rhysodes and Salmonella provide a model to study transient symbiosis between bacterial pathogens and protozoa in an aquatic ecosystem.