We combine drop-based microfluidics and an IVT2H system to develop a drop-based IVT2H platform; this platform enables cost-effective, fast, high-throughput, label-free, and stress free protein detection at a single-cell level. We demonstrate this capability by quantifying antibodies in single antibody-secreting cells and detecting kinase activity in single cancer cells. These can be directly applied to construct engineering antibody, test drug efficiency, and enrich drug-resistance cells. More broadly, because IVT2H system can be potentially designed to detect many types of proteins as long as two binding molecules are available for this protein, thus, our technique can be a universal method to assay proteins within single cells. Moreover, the ability to link genotype and phenotype of single cells enables investigation of the relationship between protein level change and the changes at both genomic and transcriptomic levels; this will strongly deepen the understanding of a highly heterogeneous cell population, and thus provide a powerful tool to study the rare but significant biological events and design customized strategy for cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Drop-based IVT2H platform for protein analysis and drug development

248th National Meeting (2014)

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