Single-cell detection of DMSO promoted HL-60 differentiation toward granulocyte based on DC-iDEP for medicine...

The most common form of leukemia in adults is acute leukemia. Drug differentiation control is an extremely critical treatment for acute leukemia. Unfortunately, current techniques detecting differentiation control experience long time and complex steps of verification hindering the pace of medicine discovery: flow cytometry and RT-PCR are highly accurate and efficient at a cost of inconvenient fluorescent labeling or a high risk of contamination; conventional staining leads to cell death unavailable for further pharmacological tests. There is a great interest in developing simple, fast, and non-invasive techniques to screen medicine. DC-iDEP is an emerging label-free identification technique taking advantage of the whole cell native biophysical property for sorting cell populations. Here, HL-60 cell line has been used as a model to study the differentiation process toward granulocytes and medicine efficacy. The results showed that DEP succeeded in detecting the DMSO promoted HL-60 differentiation degree by the weighted average characterization factor. This factor is related to the single cell biophysical property, which accumulates to generate differences in each population with distinct constitutions. Furthermore, cichoric acid was investigated to be capable of promoting DMSO-induced differentiation efficiently. Using the change induced by cichoric acid, the HL-60 medicine screening application has been first attempted based on DEP. A rapid, label-free medicine screening method has been established to monitor HL-60 differentiation toward granulocyte and has great potential for medicine screening.