Integrated single-cell metabolism monitoring platform

Recent work has shown that incorporating optical tweezers with microfluidic devices is useful for monitoring cell properties for diagnostic and sorting purposes. The integration of optical tweezers with microfluidic devices presents the potential to monitor single-cell response to changing extracellular conditions. We present a simple system using laminar flow in a microfluidic chip to generate two different and distinct environments between which a trapped cell is moved. As examples of the capabilities of our system, cellular responses to increased salinity and ethanol are monitored by measuring the cell morphology and endogenous fluorescence from co-enzymes nicotinamide-adenine dinucleotide and flavin adenine dinucleotide.