A microfluidic dual-well device for high-throughput single-cell capture and culture

作者：Lin Ching Hui; Hsiao Yi Hsing; Chang Hao Chen; Yeh Chuan Feng; He Cheng Kun; Salm Eric M; Chen Chihchen; Chiu Ing Ming^*; Hsu Chia Hsien

来源：Lab on a Chip, 2015, 15(14): 2928-2938.

DOI：10.1039/c5lc00541h

In vitro culture of single cells facilitates biological studies by deconvoluting complications from cell population heterogeneity. However, there is still a lack of simple yet high-throughput methods to perform single cell culture experiments. In this paper, we report the development and application of a microfluidic device with a dual-well (DW) design concept for high-yield single-cell loading (similar to 77%) in large microwells (285 and 485 mu m in diameter) which allowed for cell spreading, proliferation and differentiation. The increased single-cell loading yield is achieved by using sets of small microwells termed "capture-wells" and big microwells termed "culture-wells" according to their utilities for single-cell capture and culture, respectively. This novel device architecture allows the size of the "culture" microwells to be flexibly adjusted without affecting the single-cell loading efficiency making it useful for cell culture applications as demonstrated by our experiments of KT98 mouse neural stem cell differentiation, A549 and MDA-MB-435 cancer cell proliferation, and single-cell colony formation assay with A549 cells in this paper.

• 出版日期2015
• 单位清华大学