Microfluidics-based Single Cell Analytical Platforms for Characterization of Cancer

Cells are defined as the basic functional unit of living organisms. They sense environmental stimuli, respond and adapt to the environmental changes chemically or physically in order to form and maintain the distinct tissues in complex biological organisms. Therefore, even cells of identical genetic identities can display a wide disparity of physical responses (such as cell morphologies) or chemical responses (such as RNA or protein expression level regulation). These asynchronous responses to the microenvironments, often due to random fl uctuations, or noise in gene especially when techniques with single cell sensitivity are not available. Hence, currently our understanding of cells are in many aspects limited by the inherent ensemble average obtained by analyzing bulk populations of cells, which does not necessary precisely represent the individual behavior of each cell within a population.