An automated real-time microfluidic platform to probe single NK cell heterogeneity and cytotoxicity on-chip.

ABSTRACT: Cytotoxicity is a vital effector mechanism used by immune cells to combat pathogens and cancer cells. While conventional cytotoxicity assays rely on averaged end-point measures, crucial insights on the dynamics and heterogeneity of effector and target cell interactions cannot be extracted, emphasizing the need for dynamic single-cell analysis. Here, we present a fully automated droplet-based microfluidic platform that allowed the real-time monitoring of effector-target cell interactions and killing, allowing the screening of over 60,000 droplets identifying 2000 individual cellular interactions monitored over 10 h. During the course of incubation, we observed that the dynamics of cytotoxicity within the Natural Killer (NK) cell population varies significantly over the time. Around 20% of t

SUBMITTER: Subedi N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8385055 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature