For the present research of tumor biology, three-dimensional cell clumps are a novel and effective technique that can more accurately recreate the physiological environment and tumor form in vivo. The majority of existing approaches for observing cell clusters use conventional optical imaging techniques, which frequently call either fluorescent tagging or even slice imaging of cell clusters. As a non-optical label-free imaging technique, scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) is gaining popularity. It is challenging to get data on gene expression in cells other than electrochemical signals for the present characterization of cell clusters by scanning electrochemical microscopy, which frequently uses a small number of homogenous clusters and single-line scanning.
This work used openable microfluidic chip technology to combine the culture of tumor and somatic cell clumps on a single chip (85 x 4 culture units), addressing the shortcomings of the current study mentioned above. Once the chip has been opened, distinct cell clumps are scanned and imaged using SECM before a single cell clump is precisely selected for multi-gene expression analysis. The results of the SECM imaging demonstrate that the use of dual-modality repeated scans can successfully reduce the impact of the electrochemical signal of the clumps' bottom surface topography, and that alkaline phosphatase has increased enzymatic activity on the breast cancer (MCF7) clumps. On the fibroblast bulk, the enzymatic activity was not very high.ALP is up-regulated in cancer cells, which was further substantiated by gene expression analysis of specific cell clusters of each type after careful selection of clusters of interest in imaging. Other genes, including the pluripotency-related Sox2 gene and the epithelial marker genes MUC1 and EPCAM, were also highly elevated in 3D tumor masses compared to fibroblasts.
With Professor Zhang Xueji's inspiration, researchers from the Institute of Precision Medicine and Health at the University of Science and Technology of Beijing have made another significant advancement in the integration of microfluidics with scanning electrochemical microscopy. fresh bridge "Using SECM label-free imaging technology to explore the field of biomedicine has always been a hot spot in the field of analytical chemistry," said Dr. Zhao Liang. "Microfluidic technology can further help SECM, so that the entire cell imaging research process becomes more fluid, generate more valuable information, such as seamless downstream large-scale gene expression analysis," he added.
