Cell-to-cell interaction of a mouse dendritic cell and a mouse melanoma cell studied within a microfluidic chip

Abstract

Long-term monitoring of biochemical changes on a single cell has provided new information about unusual cellular response to reagents. A microchip device that was fabricated with a cell retention chamber allows selection, retention and shuttling of a single biological cell for long-time analysis. Excellent optical and fluorescent observation of the single cell have been simultaneously achieved. We previously reported this microfluidic method for the analysis on single multi-drug resistance (MDR) leukemia cells because MDR-mediated drug efflux is known to be a major cause of the failure of chemotherapy. This measurement method is dubbed as the same-single-cell analysis (SASCA), which takes advantages of tracking one and the same cell over a long period of time. This method is now employed to study cell-to-cell interaction in cancer research using the mouse cell model. In Australia, melanoma is the most common cancer in the 15-44 year age group and accounts for 3% of all cancer deaths. Queensland has the highest incidence rate of melanoma in the world. The murine melanoma B16OVA has been used as a model to determine in what form of cell-derived tumour antigen is cross-presented to murine dendritic cells (DCs). In this study, we have trapped one DC2114 cell in the microfluidic biochip and then bring a second type of cell (i.e. B16OVA) in close proximity to the first cell. The cell-to-cell interaction is then fluorescently imaged to show the time-course changes. We envision this study will provide insight into the mechanism of antigen cross presentation.