Research and application advances in real-time single-cell functional analysis

Real-time single-cell functional analysis (RT-SCFA) continuously interrogates living single cells at subcellular spatial resolution and second-to-millisecond temporal resolution, enabling in situ profiling of secretion/efflux, redox stress, metabolic fluxes, and fluctuations of key signaling molecules during stimulation, drug exposure, and microenvironmental perturbations. RT-SCFA has therefore become a critical toolbox for revealing cellular heterogeneity, elucidating disease mechanisms, and evaluating therapeutic responses. This review systematically summarizes methodological and application advances in RT-SCFA, with a focus on breakthroughs in sensitivity, spatiotemporal selectivity, quantitative reliability, multimodal cross-validation, and scalable functional phenotyping enabled by electrochemical nanoprobes/nanoelectrodes, fiber-optic nanoprobes, bifunctional electro-optical probes, photoactivated nucleic-acid probes and AND-gated strategies, and microfluidic/optofluidic high-throughput platforms. Representative applications are discussed across tumor metabolism and pharmacological mechanism elucidation, dynamic neurotransmitter release, in vivo localized chemical signal monitoring, cytokine secretion and immune-cell functional profiling, germ-cell quality assessment, biomaterials interface evaluation, and functional phenotyping of environmental microorganisms. Despite rapid progress from single-cell to organelle-scale dynamic measurements and higher-throughput population-level profiling, key challenges remain, including probe invasiveness and biocompatibility, long-term stability and drift calibration, absolute quantification, throughput scalability, and cross-platform standardization, which collectively hinder clinical translation and industrialization. Future development of RT-SCFA will likely center on establishing reproducible standardized evaluation systems, enabling synchronized multi-parameter and high-throughput integration, and deeply coupling RT-SCFA with single-cell/spatial omics and perturbation experiments to build a closed-loop "observation-mechanism-intervention" validation framework, thereby accelerating precision medicine and translational deployment.