Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2020 Jan;4(1):e1900188.
doi: 10.1002/adbi.201900188. Epub 2019 Nov 26.

Single-Cell Analysis Using Droplet Microfluidics

Kinga Matuła  1 , Francesca Rivello  1 , Wilhelm T S Huck  1
Affiliations
Review

Single-Cell Analysis Using Droplet Microfluidics

Kinga Matuła et al. Adv Biosyst. 2020 Jan.

Abstract

Droplet microfluidics has revolutionized the study of single cells. The ability to compartmentalize cells within picoliter droplets in microfluidic devices has opened up a wide range of strategies to extract information at the genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, or metabolomic level from large numbers of individual cells. Studying the different molecular landscapes at single-cell resolution has provided the authors with a detailed picture of intracellular heterogeneity and the resulting changes in cellular phenotypes. In addition, these technologies have aided in the discovery of rare cells in tumors or in the immune system, and left the authors with a deeper understanding of the fundamental biological processes that determine cell fate. This review aims to provide a detailed overview of the various droplet microfluidic strategies reported in the literature, taking into account the sometimes subtle differences in workflow or reagents that enable or improve certain protocols. Specifically, approaches to targeted- and whole-genome analysis, as well as whole-transcriptome profiling techniques, are reviewed. In addition, an up-to-date overview of new methods to characterize and quantify single-cell protein levels, and of developments to screen secreted molecules such as antibodies, cytokines, or metabolites at the single-cell level, is provided.

Keywords: droplet microfluidics; genomes; proteomes; single-cell; transcriptomes.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. J. R. Heath, A. Ribas, P. S. Mischel, Nat. Rev. Drug Discovery 2016, 15, 204.
    1. G.-C. Yuan, L. Cai, M. Elowitz, T. Enver, G. Fan, G. Guo, R. Irizarry, P. Kharchenko, J. Kim, S. Orkin, J. Quackenbush, A. Saadatpour, T. Schroeder, R. Shivdasani, I. Tirosh, Genome Biol. 2017, 18, 84.
    1. A. Colman-Lerner, A. Gordon, E. Serra, T. Chin, O. Resnekov, D. Endy, C. Gustavo Pesce, R. Brent, Nature 2005, 437, 699.
    1. R. P. das Neves, N. S. Jones, L. Andreu, R. Gupta, T. Enver, F. J. Iborra, PLoS Biol. 2010, 8, e1000560.
    1. R. Satija, A. K. Shalek, Trends Immunol. 2014, 35, 219.

LinkOut - more resources

-