On-Chip Magnetic CELL Separation and Subsequent Molecuar Analysis

The demand for high-throughput single cell assays is gaining importance with the recognition of the heterogeneity of cell suspensions.  These suspensions may display cell-to-cell variability at the gene expression level through protein expression level which can have impact in our study of functional genomics, cancer, stem-cell research and drug screening. The on-chip separation and analysis of individual cells in an isolated environment can reduce cross-contamination, provide high recovery,  and enable the study of biological traits at a single cell level.

In this presentation we will report on our next generation of cell separation chip, which we introduce recently in a paper by Chen et al. (2013).  This devices integrates mobile magnetic trap array with microfluidic technology  (Henighan et al. 2010; Vieira et al. 2009) to separate magnetically labeled cells into streams that allow further analysis.  In parallel with this on chip separation, we are further developing and optimizing commercial RNA “ish” technology which allows single cell RNA analysis without the need for PCR combined with antibody labeling to allow the potential, multiparameter analysis on a single chip.