Analyzing the intracellular contents and enzymatic activities of single cells is important for studying the physiological and pathological activities at the cellular level. For this purpose, we developed a simple single-cell lysis method by using a dense array of microwells of 10-30-pL volume fabricated by poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) and a commercially available cell lysis reagent. To demonst...

Cell-to-cell heterogeneity is important in many biological processes. Although genomic and transcriptomic approaches to detect this heterogeneity are available, measuring the proteomes of single cells presents a much greater challenge. Herr, Schaffer and colleagues describe a western blotting approach for single cells, allowing the multiplex detection of up to 11 proteins per cell for ~2,000 ce...

Large arrays of homogeneous microwells each defining a femtoliter volume are a versatile platform for monitoring the substrate turnover of many individual enzyme molecules in parallel. The high degree of parallelization enables the analysis of a statistically representative enzyme population. Enclosing individual enzyme molecules in microwells does not require any surface immobilization step an...

Cell patterning has been widely used in research on fundamental cell biology and in applications such as tissue engineering, neuron network formation, cell based biosensor and drug screening. Although various methods have been developed, cell patterning in an enclosed microfluidic device at single cell level remains challenging. This paper describes a microfluidic device with microwells and pro...

A self-seeding microwell chip is introduced for the isolation and interrogation of single cells. A cell suspension is transferred to a microwell chip containing 6400 microwells, each microwell with a single 5 μm pore in the bottom. The fluid enters the microwell and drags a cell onto the pore. After a cell has landed onto the pore, it will stop the fluid flow through this microwell. The remaini...

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs), shed from primary tumors and disseminated into peripheral blood, are playing a major role in metastasis. Even after isolation of CTCs from blood, the target cells are mixed with a population of other cell types. Here, we propose a new method for analyses of cell mixture at the single-cell level using a microfluidic device that contains arrayed electroactive micro...

in this paper, the focus is on a new kind of biodegradable semi-interpenetrating polymer networks, which derived from ɛ-caprolactone, lactide, 1,4-butane diisocyanate and ethylenediamine and also its potential has been investigated in soft tissue engineering applications. the polymers were characterized by nuclear magnetic resonance (nmr) spectrometry, fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (f...

The development of low volume, high throughput platforms for screening and manipulating protein crystallization has been driven, in part, by the importance of understanding protein structurefunction relations. Recently, significant attention has been directed to design protein crystals as higher efficiency catalytic materials1 and to use crystalline proteins for controlled protein/drug delivery...