Cellular Interrogation: Exploiting Cell-to-Cell Variability to Discriminate Regulatory Mechanisms in Oscillatory Signalling.

ABSTRACT: The molecular complexity within a cell may be seen as an evolutionary response to the external complexity of the cell's environment. This suggests that the external environment may be harnessed to interrogate the cell's internal molecular architecture. Cells, however, are not only nonlinear and non-stationary, but also exhibit heterogeneous responses within a clonal, isogenic population. In effect, each cell undertakes its own experiment. Here, we develop a method of cellular interrogation using programmable microfluidic devices which exploits the additional information present in cell-to-cell variation, without requiring model parameters to be fitted to data. We focussed on Ca2+ signalling in response to hormone stimulation, which exhibits oscillatory spiking in many cell types and chose

SUBMITTER: Estrada J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4930170 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature