Single-Cell Quantitative Phenotyping via the Aptamer-Mounted Nest-PCR (Apt-nPCR)

Analyzing single-cell phenotypes is increasingly required in biomedical studies, for non-genetic understanding of cellular activities and the biological significance of rare cell subpopulations. However, as compared to the genotypic analysis, single-cell phenotype analysis is technically more challenging. Herein, a tractable method that allows quantitative phenotyping of single cell is developed in this work, termed as the aptamer-mounted nest-PCR (Apt-nPCR). In specific, only two rounds of PCR reactions are required to complete the analysis, where aptamers (short oligonucleotides that bind to specific target molecules) are used as the recognition elements to bind antigens and also as the templates of nPCR for multiplexed and quantitative detection. So, quantitative information of these target antigens can be revealed by quantitative PCR analysis of these aptamers, which can thus be used to interpret cell phenotypes in a quantitative-to-qualitative way. By addressing two technical issues that are involved in single-cell phenotype analysis─multiplexed detection plus high sensitivity, we have shown the availability of this method for single-cell phenotyping. Therefore, the Apt-nPCR method may represent a tractable method to facilitate the single-cell phenotype analysis, which can be used as a complementary method against these single-cell genotyping methods in our daily research.