title: Microfluidic single-cell analysis for systems immunology.
abstract: The immune system constantly battles infection and tissue damage, but exaggerated immune responses lead to allergies, autoimmunity and cancer. Discrimination of self from foreign and the fine-tuning of immunity are achieved by information processing pathways, whose regulatory mechanisms are little understood. Cell-to-cell variability and stochastic molecular interactions result in diverse cellular responses to identical signaling inputs, casting doubt on the reliability of traditional population-averaged analyses. Furthermore, dynamic molecular and cellular interactions create emergent properties that change over multiple time scales. Understanding immunity in the face of complexity and noisy dynamics requires time-dependent analysis of single-cells in a proper context. Microfluidic systems create precisely defined microenvironments by controlling fluidic and surface chemistries, feature sizes, geometries and signal input timing, and thus enable quantitative multi-parameter analysis of single cells. Such qualities allow observable dynamic environments approaching in vivo levels of biological complexity. Seamless parallelization of functional units in microfluidic devices allows high-throughput measurements, an essential feature for statistically meaningful analysis of naturally variable biological systems. These abilities recapitulate diverse scenarios such as cell-cell signaling, migration, differentiation, antibody and cytokine production, clonal selection, and cell lysis, thereby enabling accurate and meaningful study of immune behaviors in vitro.
authors: Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, Switzerland. savas.tay@bsse.ethz.ch.
authors: Michael
authors: M
authors: Junkin
authors: Savaş
authors: S
authors: Tay
mesh_terms: D000486:Allergy and Immunology; D000818:Animals; D015551:Autoimmunity; D006801:Humans; D046210:Microfluidic Analytical Techniques / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000276:immunology*; D011173:Portraits as Topic; D049490:Systems Biology / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends