Single-cell Molecular Cloning and Screening Platform

Inquiry

The basic technologies of microfluidics for the study of single cells have been well developed in the last decades. Under cell handling methods, microfluidics has been extensively applied in the field of PCR, immunoassays, organ-on-a-chip, stem cell research, and identification of tumor cells. As a key step in molecular discovery, high-throughput screening performs rapid and efficient analysis of hundreds of biological, chemical, genetic, and pharmacological assays in parallel. With abundant expertise and experience in microfluidic platforms, Creative Biolabs provides microfluidic integrated solutions for simple, fast, and robust single-cell molecular cloning and screening for worldwide customers. In particular, our microfluidic integrated solutions are establishing several screening methods including perfusion flow mode, droplet mode, and microarray mode, to enable molecular identification and analysis at unprecedented efficiency and sensitivity.

Capture and Enrichment of Single Cells

Correlation of genetic information with its single cell of origin requires an approach to isolate single cells from a tissue. Recently, approaches have been used for the selection and transfer of single cells into wells including laser capture microdissection, optical tweezer manipulation, flow cytometry (FCM), and microfluidic methods. These approaches show differences in their cost, facility requirements, tissue compatibility, throughput, and degree of user skill. Laser capture microdissection allows certainty of cell isolation, but at very low throughput. FCM is attractive due to its high throughput and multiparameter sorting, but depositing cells into microliter volume wells leads to dilution of analytes and doesn’t easily confirm that cells are successfully deposited into the analysis volume. Remarkably, enrichment and compartmentalization within a microfluidic chip or system can be designed for high throughput while minimizing dilution and contamination risk.

Fig. 1 Microfluidic chip for single cell capture.¹

Microfluidic Integrated Solutions for Single-cell Molecular Cloning & Screening

Tackling heterogeneous cells at single-cell resolution is increasingly significant in different branches of biological and biomedical subjects. Numerous useful techniques have been implemented to profile and selectively purify single-cells, but the demand for techniques with better analytical capabilities and enhanced high-throughput performance, is still very high. To obtain sufficient data from tissue samples, single-cell molecular cloning techniques need high sample throughput and yield high recoveries of target cells.

At Creative Biolabs, our microfluidic equipment is used upstream of cell trapping, isolation, manipulation, and genetic analysis methods, these techniques permit high purity retrieval of viable cells with the specific marker. Nowadays, our scientists take advantage of various strategies and custom services to indiscriminately screen single cells from a cell suspension in microfluidic networks. Here are our single cell-based molecular cloning and high-throughput screening platforms on microfluidic chips.

Fig. 2 Microfluidic chip for single cell profile screening.²

Perfusion flow mode high-throughput screening platform

We provide microfluidic devices applied to perform screening tests in a perfusion flow mode. This mode of screening devices requires a suite of generic components for importing samples and reagents, transferring fluids within a microchannel system, as well as combining and mixing reactants.

Droplet mode high-throughput screening platform

Our experts have developed microfluidic droplet platforms, such as droplet-based or multiphase microfluidic chips, to execute a wide range of experiments for biology and chemistry screening projects. The major characteristic of microfluidic droplet systems is the usage of water-in-oil emulsion droplets to divide reagents into nanoliter to picoliter volumes. For example, we have used a droplet microfluidic chip for ultra-high-throughput single-cell screening and sequencing analysis. This kind of project focuses on immune cells such as B lymphocytes that can generate therapeutic antibodies or produce biomolecules of industrial interest.

Microarray mode high-throughput screening platform

High-throughput screening systems based on microchips or microarrays enable assays with a large number of biological samples on a 2D solid substrate. Our fast, inexpensive microarrays have been broadly exploited in assays of gene expression, protein profiling, and drug screening. Microarrays can perform single-cell molecular cloning and screen for thousands of different cell samples simultaneously in one single chip.

Key-benefits

Promising platforms for single-cell molecular cloning and high-throughput screening services;
Low sample requirement, low analysis cost, and low time consumption;
Easy handling of nanoliter-volumes of liquids and suitable for single cell-based experiments;
Sophisticated engineers with rich experience in designing microfluidic chips and customized services.

Single-cell technology has a great influence on the field of biology. Impressive progress has been made in the past years, strongly facilitated by microfluidic approaches. As a famous partner with high reputations in microfluidic projects, Creative Biolabs has summarized the application of microfluidics in single cell-based molecular cloning and high-throughput screening technologies. If you’ like to know more about our one-stop microfluidic solutions, please directly contact us or send us an e-mail with specific requests.

References

Deng, Wang, et al. " Microfluidic Cell Trapping for Single-Cell Analysis " Micromachines 10.6 (2019): 409.
Ai, Wu, et al. " A Precise Microfluidic Assay in Single-Cell Profile for Screening of Transient Receptor Potential Channel Modulators " Adv Sci 19.7 (2020): 11.

For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.