Dataset Information

Microfluidic guillotine for single-cell wound repair studies.

ABSTRACT: Wound repair is a key feature distinguishing living from nonliving matter. Single cells are increasingly recognized to be capable of healing wounds. The lack of reproducible, high-throughput wounding methods has hindered single-cell wound repair studies. This work describes a microfluidic guillotine for bisecting single Stentor coeruleus cells in a continuous-flow manner. Stentor is used as a model due to its robust repair capacity and the ability to perform gene knockdown in a high-throughput manner. Local cutting dynamics reveals two regimes under which cells are bisected, one at low viscous stress where cells are cut with small membrane ruptures and high viability and one at high viscous stress where cells are cut with extended membrane ruptures and decreased viability. A cutting throughput up to 64 cells per minute-more than 200 times faster than current methods-is achieved. The method allows the generation of more than 100 cells in a synchronized stage of their repair process. This capacity, combined with high-throughput gene knockdown in Stentor, enables time-course mechanistic studies impossible with current wounding methods.

SUBMITTER: Blauch LR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5514750 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Microfluidic guillotine for single-cell wound repair studies.

Blauch Lucas R LR Gai Ya Y Khor Jian Wei JW Sood Pranidhi P Marshall Wallace F WF Tang Sindy K Y SKY

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20170626 28

Wound repair is a key feature distinguishing living from nonliving matter. Single cells are increasingly recognized to be capable of healing wounds. The lack of reproducible, high-throughput wounding methods has hindered single-cell wound repair studies. This work describes a microfluidic guillotine for bisecting single <i>Stentor coeruleus</i> cells in a continuous-flow manner. <i>Stentor</i> is used as a model due to its robust repair capacity and the ability to perform gene knockdown in a hig ...[more]

PMID: 28652371

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundWound healing is one of the defining features of life and is seen not only in tissues but also within individual cells. Understanding wound response at the single-cell level is critical for determining fundamental cellular functions needed for cell repair and survival. This understanding could also enable the engineering of single-cell wound repair strategies in emerging synthetic cell research. One approach is to examine and adapt self-repair mechanisms from a living system that already demonstrates robust capacity to heal from large wounds. Towards this end, Stentor coeruleus, a single-celled free-living ciliate protozoan, is a unique model because of its robust wound healing capacity. This capacity allows one to perturb the wounding conditions and measure their effect on the repair process without immediately causing cell death, thereby providing a robust platform for probing the self-repair mechanism.ResultsHere we used a microfluidic guillotine and a fluorescence-based assay to probe the timescales of wound repair and of mechanical modes of wound response in Stentor. We found that Stentor requires ~ 100-1000 s to close bisection wounds, depending on the severity of the wound. This corresponds to a healing rate of ~ 8-80 μm2/s, faster than most other single cells reported in the literature. Further, we characterized three distinct mechanical modes of wound response in Stentor: contraction, cytoplasm retrieval, and twisting/pulling. Using chemical perturbations, active cilia were found to be important for only the twisting/pulling mode. Contraction of myonemes, a major contractile fiber in Stentor, was surprisingly not important for the contraction mode and was of low importance for the others.ConclusionsWhile events local to the wound site have been the focus of many single-cell wound repair studies, our results suggest that large-scale mechanical behaviors may be of greater importance to single-cell wound repair than previously thought. The work here advances our understanding of the wound response in Stentor and will lay the foundation for further investigations into the underlying components and molecular mechanisms involved.

Project description:Single-cell whole-transcriptome analysis is a powerful tool for quantifying gene expression heterogeneity in populations of cells. Many techniques have, thus, been recently developed to perform transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) on individual cells. To probe subtle biological variation between samples with limiting amounts of RNA, more precise and sensitive methods are still required. We adapted a previously developed strategy for single-cell RNA-Seq that has shown promise for superior sensitivity and implemented the chemistry in a microfluidic platform for single-cell whole transcriptome analysis. In this approach, single cells are captured and lysed in a microfluidic device, where mRNAs with poly(A) tails are reverse-transcribed into cDNA. Double-stranded cDNA is then collected and sequenced using a next-generation sequencing platform. We prepared 94 libraries consisting of single mouse embryonic cells and technical replicates of extracted RNA and thoroughly characterized the performance of this technology. Microfluidic implementation increased mRNA detection sensitivity as well as improved measurement precision compared with tube-based protocols. With 0.2M reads per cell, we were able to reconstruct a majority of the bulk transcriptome with 10 single cells. We also quantified variation between and within different types of mouse embryonic cells and found that enhanced measurement precision, detection sensitivity, and experimental throughput aided the distinction between biological variability and technical noise. With this work, we validated the advantages of an early approach to single-cell RNA-Seq and showed that the benefits of combining microfluidic technology with high-throughput sequencing will be valuable for large-scale efforts in single-cell transcriptome analysis. We investigated gene expression in mouse embryonic cells using microfluidic-facilitated RNA-Seq to analyze 56 single mouse ES cell (mESC) transcriptomes and 6 single mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) transcriptomes. To quantitatively evaluate the sensitivity and precision of our technique, we also sequenced 23 libraries from extracted mESC RNA, representing three sets of technical replicates with varying starting amounts of material.

Dataset Information

Microfluidic guillotine for single-cell wound repair studies.

Publications

Microfluidic guillotine for single-cell wound repair studies.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets