Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) hold the potential for cancer diagnosis and monitoring, offering a non-invasive method to track tumor evolution. However, their extreme rarity in the bloodstream and technical challenges in isolating them have severely limited their clinical utility. In a recent study published in...
Leukocyte differentiation and counting are critical for clinical diagnostics but are hindered by the low throughput and labor-intensive nature of traditional microscopy and the limitations of physical constriction microchannels in flow cytometry. A recent study in the journal of Microsystems and Nanoengineering introduces a microfluidic...
Screening for microbial proteolytic activity is essential in various biotechnological applications, including bioenergy, food processing, and pharmaceuticals. Traditional methods, such as cultivation on agar plates with skimmed milk, often result in low throughput and potential false positives from non-proteolytic activities. The need for more accurate,...
Understanding how cellular components, especially chromatin and nuclear condensates, respond to mechanical forces during confined migration is crucial. This is particularly relevant in the context of cancer metastasis, where cells must navigate through tight interstitial spaces, imposing severe mechanical deformations on the nucleus. These deformations...
In droplet microfluidics, high-throughput screening is critical for analyzing large cellular or molecular libraries at single-cell resolution. However, achieving high sorting accuracy remains a challenge, especially with the droplet size variability inherent in multi-step assays or extended incubations. Conventional microfluidic sorting methods, such as those...