集成微流控芯片在单细胞测序样品制备中的应用

Recently, single cell sequencing has become the cutting-edge technology to reveal the complexity of biological processes at the finest scale. However, it is not easy to handle single cells precisely, nor to perform the small scale reactions accurately. Microfluidics offers a ready solution to control the liquid delivery at the picoliter scale, matching the accuracy requirements for single cell analyses. We review the recently reported applications that using integrated microfluidic devices to facilitate the sample preparation for single cell sequencing. Various sequencing approaches with very limited starting materials, such as single cell whole-genome sequencing, single cell whole-transcriptome sequencing, and 1,000-cell chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing, have been successfully performed with microfluidic assistance. Compared to conventional methods, integrated microfluidic devices exhibit unique advantages in manipulation and capturing single cells, and provide flexible tools for performing high throughput experiments in parallel. The results are highly repeatable and reproducible, showing great potential in sample preparation for single cell sequencing.