Description
Nano-liter Scale Liquid Isolation and Screening of Single Cells using Capillarity Guided Patterning
Dohyun Park1, Younggyun Lee1, Myeongwoo Kang1, Noo Li Jeon1*
1Division of WCU Multiscale Mechanical Design, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea
This research describes a single cell screening platform mediated by capillary action between nano-liter hydrogel and patterned microstructures. By comparing with other single cell screening tools such as microwell and microfluidic devices, this platform enables faster patterning of single cell by simple wiping and easy collection of the single cells.
As part of the platform, the growth rate of microalgae was screened with the understanding that increased growth rates corresponded with higher biofuel yield. First, a suspension of microalgae in an alginic acid solution was stochastically quantified for density and then dispersed over microposts by a PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) wiper, resulting in patterned nano-liter scale alginic acid droplets. The patterned nano-liter alginic acid droplets were then treated with a CaCl2 fixing solution for observation. 32.8% of the resultant gel fragments were observed to contain single microalgal cells. After three days of cultivation, a chelator was used to collect colonies selected for either high or low growth rates.
This technique shows the possibility of enhanced single cell resolution screening for microalgal growth rates in the interest of biofuel production, and also shows promise for the fast and simple single cell screening of any 3D gel cultivatable cells as used in applications like cancer immunotherapy studies.
[1] Shima P. Damodaran, Stephan Eberhard, Laurent Boitard, Jairo Garnica Rodriguez, Yuxing Wang, Nicolas Bremond, Jean Baudry, Jérôme Bibette, PLoS One, 2015, 10(3), e0118987.
[2] Myeongwoo Kang, Woohyun Park, Sangcheol Na, Sang-Min Paik, Hyunjae Lee, Jae Woo Park, Ho-Young Kim, Noo Li Jeon, small, 2015,11(23), 2789-2797.
This research was supported by the Bio & Medical Technology Development Program of the National Research Foundation (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (Grant number 2015M3A9D7030461).