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Cells are the fundamental units of living organisms. Despite the apparent synchrony in cellular systems, even individual cells from the same cell line or tissue can present distinct genomes, transcriptomes, and epigenomes during cell division and differentiation. Therefore, it is necessary to isolate the cells for further analysis, which is valuable for diagnostics, biotechnological and biomedical research.

Single cell isolation techniques are the methods to physically separate individual cells from each other and/or from matrix materials. A variety of single cell isolation technologies have been developed, including fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS), manual cell picking, laser capture microdissection, limiting dilution, microfluidics, and others. The performance of these isolation technologies is typically characterized by single-cell yield, cell viability (after isolation), purity (the fraction of target cells collected after isolation), throughput (how many cells can be isolated in a certain time), number of cells needed, and costs. In general, the choice of a cell isolation technology depends on the nature and origin of the sample, as well as the processing or analysis of the cells after isolation.

Comparison of CellGem™ with Other Single Cell Isolation Techniques

Microfluidic Hydrodynamic Trapping

Microfluidics is a powerful enabling technology for investigating the inherent complexity of cellular systems because of its precise fluid control, low sample consumption, miniaturization, low analytical costs, and easy handling of nanoliters-volumes. According to the cell sorting mechanism, microfluidics can be divided into three types, which are cell-affinity chromatography based microfluidic, cell physical characteristics based microfluidic, immunomagnetic beads based microfluidic. Hydrodynamic cell trapping is a microfluidic separation method based on cell physical characteristics.

Hydrodynamic traps are passive structures in microfluidic channels that allow only a single cell to enter the "trap". Typically, double occupancy is minimized by adjusting the trap size to the average cell size for a given sample. Such systems can be run in parallel on a large number of cells by using a large number of traps. Hydrodynamic cell trapping can even be integrated into handheld pipettes to enable manual single-cell pipetting without the need of micromanipulation under a microscope.

CellGem™ Single Cell Capture and Culture Slides

Amerigo Scientific offers CellGem™, a simple and smart single cell isolation and culture platform based on microfluidic hydrodynamic trapping. By the microfluidic technology, CellGem™ enables precise cell manipulation with high throughput and low reagent consumption.

Applications

Principle

The CellGem™ slide comprises of an array of microwells for capturing single cells, coupled with a corresponding array of culture wells for long-term culture of the stable cell line development.

Benefits

Validated Cell Line

Examples of Cell Isolation and Culture Using CellGem™