A pipette-tip based method for seeding cells to droplet microfluidic platforms
Author(s)
Sinha, Nidhi
Subedi, Nikita
Wimmers, Florian
Soennichsen, Melf
Tel, Jurjen
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Amongst various microfluidic platform designs frequently used for cellular analysis, droplet-microfluidics provides a robust tool for isolating and analyzing cells at the single-cell level by eliminating the influence of external factors on the cellular microenvironment. Encapsulation of cells in droplets is dictated by the Poisson distribution as a function of the number of cells present in each droplet and the average number of cells per volume of droplet. Primary cells, especially immune cells, or clinical specimens can be scarce and loss-less encapsulation of cells remains challenging. In this paper, we present a new methodology that uses pipette-tips to load cells to droplet-based microfluidic devices without the significant loss of cells. With various cell types , we demonstrate efficient cell encapsulation in droplets that closely corresponds to the encapsulation efficiency predicted by the Poisson distribution. Our method ensures loss-less loading of cells to microfluidic platforms and can be easily adapted for downstream single cell analysis, e.g., to decode cellular interactions between different cell types.
Date Issued
2019-02-11
Date Acceptance
2019-02-01
Citation
Journal of Visualized Experiments, 2019, 144, pp.1-10
ISSN
1940-087X
Publisher
MyJove Corporation
Start Page
1
End Page
10
Journal / Book Title
Journal of Visualized Experiments
Volume
144
Copyright Statement
© 2019 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
License
License
License URL
Identifier
https://www.jove.com/t/57848/a-pipette-tip-based-method-for-seeding-cells-to-droplet-microfluidic
Subjects
0601 Biochemistry and Cell Biology
1701 Psychology
1702 Cognitive Sciences
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2019-02-11