Microfluidics towards single cell resolution protein analysis.

Single cell analysis has aroused great interest with its remarkable ability to investigate cell-to-cell heterogeneity in large populations. However, probing protein information at single cells resolution including quantity, interactions, and dynamics have been great challenges as a result of the small size of cells, the complexity and a large concentration range of the protein and the lack of genome-wide amplification method. Fortunately, microfluidics capable of high throughput, high reproducibility, large parallelization, easy operability and low-cost, has been emerging as a powerful platform for the analysis of single cell proteins. In this review, we focus the recent advances of microfluidics in single cell resolution protein analysis, particularly covering the following aspects: (1) microfluidic electrophoresis (capillary electrophoresis and gel electrophoresis); (2) microfluidic cytometry (microfluidic flow cytometry, droplet based cytometry and image cytometry); (3) microfluidic array (micro wells, micro chambers, valve-based microfluidics and static droplet array microfluidics); (4) microfluidic probe and (5) microfluidics based mass spectrometry. • Microfluidic chip shows great promise in single cell resolution protein analysis field. • Recent advances in methods and technologies on microfluidic chip for single cell resolution protein analysis are reviewed. • Discusses the future improvements in microfluidics based single cell resolution protein analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]