Recent advances in microfluidic single-cell analysis and its applications in drug development

Advanced sequencing-based high-throughput and long-read single-cell transcriptome analysis

“…Currently, microfluidic-based platforms dominate the field of high-throughput scRNA-Seq due to their remarkable advantages in terms of miniaturization, integration, and parallel operations. [24][25][26] However, cell utilization was still limited by the Poisson distribution restriction. To improve cell utilization, various strategies have been developed.…”

Integrated Microfluidics for Single‐Cell Separation and On‐Chip Analysis: Novel Applications and Recent Advances

“…Most other published reviews discussing singlecell isolation and analysis methods maintain a narrow focus, for example, applications of such methods in omics for drug development. [14,15] Similarly, reviews of integrated platforms tend to focus on the isolation and analysis of specific cell types, e.g., microbial cells. [16] Herein, we take a more comprehensive approach and attempt to introduce specialist and nonspecialist readers to the most commonly used isolation and analysis methods and the application of integrated platforms for the characterization of a variety of single-cell types for a variety of applications.…”

A microfluidic approach to study variations in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii alkaline phosphatase activity in response to phosphate availability

“…Following the removal of the supernatant, the resulting cell pellet was resuspended in 10 mL of NTA media (0 mM P content) and left for 24 h to starve the cells of P. After this starvation period, cells were once again isolated using the same centrifuge step as described above, but this time the pellet was re-suspended in NTA supplemented with increasing P concentrations of 0.1, 0.5, 1, 11, 21, 31, and 41 mM and incubated for another 24 h, making up the spike period. The selection of these spike concentrations was to investigate the impact of sudden decrease (0.1 and 0.5 mM) or increase (11,21,31, and 41 mM) in P-levels on APA. Following the 24 h spike period, cells were isolated as described above and re-suspended in 1 mL of the corresponding spiked NTAP.…”

“…30 While flow cytometry can offer significantly high throughput in single cell analysis, it is a method that is heavily reliant on highly sophisticated data collection and analysis systems and can exhibit sensitivity issues depending on the choice of fluorescent stain or protein marker. 31 Alternatively, microfluidics presents a cost-effective and accessible alternative to flow cytometry and established bench-scale methods, offering advantages such as reduced reagent costs, ease of use, reproducibility, and compatibility with various fluorescent microscopy techniques. This approach is particularly suitable for applications requiring a lower cell count and seamless mixing of reagents with samples.…”