Emerging lab-on-a-particle technologies for functional single-cell analysis

THE SPEAKER

Yuta Nakagawa, PhD - Project Assistant Professor, University of Tokyo 

Yuta Nakagawa is a project assistant professor at The University of Tokyo, where his research focuses on developing novel flow cytometry tools to enable single-cell screening based on their function including secretion, proliferation, and cell-cell communication. He received his PhD from The University of Tokyo under the mentorship of Professor Keisuke Goda, where he worked on developing cutting-edge flow cytometers such as a high-throughput microfluidic droplet sorter. He was then trained as a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA under Professor Dino Di Carlo, where he worked on developing novel functional assays leveraging microparticles and flow cytometry. He is actively engaged with the ISAC community, including attendance at CYTO conferences and membership of Marylou Inghram Scholar of the ISAC leadership development program.

WEBINAR SUMMARY
Compartmentalizing single cells at the microscale is crucial for screening heterogeneous populations or libraries of mutants for functional properties such as secretion, cell-cell interactions or growth. Example applications include T cell receptor and antibody discovery as well as microbial colony picking, which have significant implications from drug screening to therapeutic development. Technologies based on microfluidics such as microwell and microdroplets have been applied to these problems. However, while these tools have been demonstrated to effectively perform cell assays, they typically require specialized instrumentation and are either limited in throughput or transport required for extended cell culture and reagent exchange, hampering wide adoption. More recently, lab-on-a-particle technologies have emerged as complementary tools for carrying out microscale reactions to analyze molecules and cells in a high-throughput manner. Microparticles suspended in oil-free aqueous phase and compatible with conventional laboratory tools such as microscopy and flow cytometry can be leveraged for assaying various functional cell assays. In this webinar, two implementations of lab-on-a-particle technologies will be introduced, namely (1) nanovials and (2) capped nanvoials. First, nanovials are cavity-containing particles that facilitate compartmentalization of single cells and capture of secreted proteins on the surface of the cavity. Here, nanovials are used to assay the single-cell secretion phenotype of collagen, a critical extracellular matrix (ECM) protein also known to play a role in fibrosis. Second, capped nanovials, which are self-assembling micro-compartments formed by “capping” nanovials with spherical particles, are introduced as a novel microcompartment functionally akin to a test tube. Crucially, capped nanovials are formed in a massively parallel manner (>100,000 capped nanovials/mL prepared in ~10 minutes) by simple pipetting and centrifugation and analyzed using accessible instruments such as microscopes and flow cytometers. Using this platform, key biomedical applications including yeast colony growth assay and a paired antibody-secreting and reporter cell assay are demonstrated.

Learning Objectives:
Participants will be introduced to an overview of lab-on-a-particle technologies and how to implement them, focusing on two specific implementations including (1) nanovials and (2) capped nanovials. The webinar will highlight how these tools can be incorporated into biomedical assays from sample preparation to assay execution, all while leveraging accessible tools such as microscopy and flow cytometry.

Who Should Attend:
Educators/Trainers, Imaging Cytometrists, Industry Scientists (vendor-agnostic; tool developers, method innovators), Research Scientists, Shared Resource Laboratory (SRL) Managers, Shared Resource Laboratory (SRL) Staff, Trainees (graduate students, postdocs, early-career researchers), Computational Biologists/Bioinformaticians, Research Scientists, Trainees (graduate students, postdocs, early-career researchers), Translational Immunologists

Keywords: lab-on-a-particle, functional single-cell analysis, flow cytometry, nanovials

CMLE Credit: 1.0