Single-Cell Analysis with the BioPen

Book chapter, 2018

This chapter presents an overview of recently published application examples of the multifunctional pipette. The BioPen fills a gap in single-cell research technology, as it addresses specific problems encountered in research on adherent single cells and tissue samples. The cell is the fundamental structured biological unit. Advances in single-cell manipulation, often referred to as next-generation sequencing techniques, have enabled rapid high-resolution genome analysis, which unraveled complexity and revealed details on cellular heterogeneity and its function. Micromanipulation is the simplest, but slowest, method of choice to manually pick individual cells or fractions of them. To date, fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) is the most common way to sort cells since it allows the automation of the entire process, to reproducibly get well-separated subpopulations of cells from an original mix. Microfluidics is nowadays the most prolific field of innovation, with many different devices already available.