Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan.
Lab Chip. 2014 Apr 7;14(7):1230-45. doi: 10.1039/c3lc51211h.
Cellular analysis plays important roles in various biological applications, such as cell biology, drug development, and disease diagnosis. Conventional cellular analysis usually measures the average response from a whole cell group. However, bulk measurements may cause misleading interpretations due to cell heterogeneity. Another problem is that current cellular analysis may not be able to differentiate various subsets of cell populations, each exhibiting a different behavior than the others. Single-cell analysis techniques are developed to analyze cellular properties, conditions, or functional responses in a large cell population at the individual cell level. Integrating optics with microfluidic platforms provides a well-controlled microenvironment to precisely control single cell conditions and perform non-invasive high-throughput analysis. This paper reviews recent developments in optofluidic technologies for various optics-based single-cell analyses, which involve single cell manipulation, treatment, and property detection. Finally, we provide our views on the future development of integrated optics with microfluidics for single-cell analysis and discuss potential challenges and opportunities of this emerging research field in biological applications.
细胞分析在各种生物应用中起着重要作用，例如细胞生物学、药物开发和疾病诊断。传统的细胞分析通常测量整个细胞群体的平均响应。然而，由于细胞异质性，批量测量可能会导致误导性解释。另一个问题是，目前的细胞分析可能无法区分细胞群体的各种亚群，每个亚群的行为都与其他亚群不同。单细胞分析技术是为了在单个细胞水平上分析大细胞群体中的细胞特性、状态或功能响应而开发的。将光学与微流控平台相结合，提供了一个可控的微环境，可以精确控制单个细胞的状态并进行非侵入式高通量分析。本文综述了基于光学的各种单细胞分析中光流控技术的最新进展，涉及单细胞操作、处理和特性检测。最后，我们对集成光学与微流控在单细胞分析中的未来发展提出了看法，并讨论了该新兴研究领域在生物应用中的潜在挑战和机遇。
