Center for Advanced Biomaterials for Healthcare@CRIB, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Largo Barsanti e Matteucci 53, 80125, Naples, Italy.
BMT Unit, Department of Pediatric Hemato-Oncology, Santobono-Pausilipon Hospital, Via Posillipo, 226, 80123, Naples, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2017 Oct 4;7(1):12666. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-12990-4.
Histology and histopathology are based on the morphometric observations of quiescent cells. Their diagnostic potential could largely benefit from a simultaneous screening of intrinsic biophysical properties at single-cell level. For such a purpose, we analyzed light scattering signatures of individual mononuclear blood cells in microfluidic flow. In particular, we extracted a set of biophysical properties including morphometric (dimension, shape and nucleus-to-cytosol ratio) and optical (optical density) ones to clearly discriminate different cell types and stages. By considering distinctive ranges of biophysical properties along with the obtained relative cell frequencies, we can identify unique cell classes corresponding to specific clinical conditions (p < 0.01). Based on such a straightforward approach, we are able to discriminate T-, B-lymphocytes, monocytes and beyond that first results on different stages of lymphoid and myeloid leukemia cells are presented. This work shows that the simultaneous screening of only three biophysical properties enables a clear distinction between pathological and physiological mononuclear blood stream cells. We believe our approach could represent a useful tool for a label-free analysis of biophysical single-cell signatures.
组织学和组织病理学基于静止细胞的形态计量学观察。如果能够在单细胞水平上同时筛选内在的生物物理特性，那么它们的诊断潜力将大大提高。为此，我们在微流控中分析了单个单核血细胞的光散射特征。具体来说，我们提取了一组生物物理特性，包括形态计量学（尺寸、形状和核质比）和光学特性（光密度），以便清楚地区分不同的细胞类型和阶段。通过考虑生物物理特性的独特范围以及获得的相对细胞频率，我们可以识别出与特定临床条件相对应的独特细胞类（p < 0.01）。基于这种简单的方法，我们能够区分 T 细胞、B 淋巴细胞、单核细胞，并且能够区分不同阶段的淋巴细胞性白血病和髓细胞性白血病细胞。这项工作表明，仅同时筛选三种生物物理特性就可以清楚地区分病理性和生理性单核血细胞。我们相信，我们的方法可以为生物物理单细胞特征的无标记分析提供一种有用的工具。
