As shown above, the current single-cell analysis way is complicated and time-consuming. Moreover, the use of protease, mechanical crushing, and other operations will affect the activity of single cells.
In the newly published paper, Scientist creativity introduced an electric field device to promote the isolation of single cells in tissue. They built two parallel plate electrodes with a gap filled with sucrose and ultrapure water and a tissue biopsy injection channel. As shown in Figure1, once a tissue sample is fed into the channel, the electric field applied between the two electrodes would penetrate the tissue and break it into individual tissue cells.
Fig.1 The process of electrical dissociation. (Welch, et al., 2022)
Furthermore, they adopted different ways to ensure cell integrity and biological activity during cell isolation. During the experiment, they optimized several experimental parameters, such as liquid medium composition, electric field type, and voltage, which affected the tissue dissociation results. After all the conditions have been optimized, they assessed the feasibility of this technology by testing human clinical GBM tissues. The results showed that the number of single cells in the electrical treatment is much higher than in the conventional treatment, which proved that the technique had strong practicability in single-cell separation.
Scientists developed a novel electric-field-based method for isolating individual cells from tissues, which has good applicability in different tissue cell isolation processes. Now, they are exploring the possibility of commercializing this device, which is an encouraging development for the field of single-cell analysis.
Reference
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