Development of microfluidic platform to high-throughput quantify single-cell intrinsic bioelectrical markers of tumor cell lines, subtypes and patient tumor cells

Abstract Although intrinsic bioelectrical markers of single cells (e.g. specific membrane capacitance of Csm, cytoplasm conductivity of σcy and cell diameter of Dc) play key roles in cell-type classification and cell-status evaluation, due to technical limitations, data from large populations of single cells were not available. This paper presents a microfluidic platform to high-throughput quantify single-cell intrinsic bioelectrical markers of tumor cell lines, subtypes and patient tumor cells, where an asymmetrical constriction channel defined by a major and two side constriction channels was used as the sensitive unit. The developed microfluidic platform was used to quantify ∼100,000 single-cell Csm, σcy and Dc from (I) eight tumor cell lines of A549, Hep G2, SW620, AGS, PANC-1, Hela, CAL 27 and HL-60 with cell-type classification rates of 87.6 %±9.1 % obtained; (II) tumor cell subtypes of 293 T with and without the transfection of the CRISPR knockout library where different distributions of Csm were located; (III) patient tumor cells with classification rates of 96.1 %±3.8 % obtained compared with tumor cell lines. In conclusion, the microfluidic platform developed in this study can function as a high-throughput tool in the field of single-cell analysis.