Abstract

Single Cell Technologies for Studies of Single Cell Secretions and Drug Response

Yu-Hwa Lo, Professor, University of California San Diego

To understand the in-homogeneity of cells in biological systems, we need the capabilities to characterize the properties of individual single cells. Since single cell studies require continuous monitoring of the cell behaviors instead of a snapshot test at a single time point, an effective single-cell assay that can support time lapsed studies in a high throughput manner is needed. Most currently available single-cell technologies cannot provide proper environments to sustain growth and, for appropriate cell types, proliferation of single cells and convenient, non-invasive tests of single cell behaviors from molecular markers. Here we present a highly versatile single-cell assay that can accommodate different cell types, enable easy and efficient single cell loading and culturing, support varieties of single cell studies against drugs and environment changes such as changes in pH value.  One salient feature of the assay is the non-invasive collection of single cell secretions at different time points, producing unprecedented insight of single cell behaviors from the biomarkers each single cell gives out under certain perturbations. The acquired information is quantitative, for example, measured by the number of exosomes each single cell secretes within a given time period.  Subsequently, those chosen single cells of particular interest such as cancer stem cells can be collected separately in a uniquely developed parallel process without disturbing the cell properties for further analysis including single cell RNASeq and molecular analyses.