(1293-B) Functional Assays at the Single Cell Level: Advantages and Applications for NK Killing Assays
Monday, February 5, 2024
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST
Location: Exhibit Halls AB
Abstract: The objective of our study is to demonstrate that functional assays at the single cell level provide information about cell properties that are otherwise inaccessible, and thus become an indispensable tool to identify and isolate cells with outstanding properties in larger heterogeneous populations.
Single cell experiments reveal individual characteristics of cells that would remain hidden in bulk experiments. They also enable the identification of cells with outstanding properties. Over the past decade, tremendous progress has been made in providing tools for high-throughput analysis of large cell populations. However, there is currently no technology available that enables analyzing large cell populations at the single cell level in an inert environment without significantly stressing the cells, while allowing to isolate cells of interest for downstream processes after analysis - all in an economical manner.
ARRALYZE is a digital cell biology platform that fulfills all of the aforementioned requirements by utilizing highly miniaturized glass-well arrays for functional single cell screening. Our micrometer-sized glass-wells accommodate hundreds of wells on the footprint of a microscope cover glass. Single cells are dispensed into these wells, continuously imaged using brightfield and fluorescent microscopy for high-throughput analysis and time lapse videos, and subsequently isolated for downstream investigations while still being viable. The platform enables controlled coculturing of different cell types, making it ideal for immune cell killing assays and other functional assays.
For the former, K562 target cells and primary NK-cells are stained with two distinct colors and co-culture in the presence of a death dye. Color change from the target cell color to the death dye indicates a killing event that is recognized automatically by the software.
By monitoring the content of each well, we can study the kinetics of the killing events, drawing insights into immune cell motility, behavior, and their effectiveness in identifying and eliminating target cells.
Our poster will demonstrate the versatility of our micrometer-sized glass-wells and show how motility, number and duration of cell-cell interactions can be correlated to the killing efficiency of target cells by NK cells – or the lack thereof.
Our contribution will not only be interesting for researchers in the field of cell therapy but for all applications that aim to find outliers or rare cells in large heterogeneous cell populations.