Development of Single Cell Printing-Liquid Vortex Capture-Mass Spectrometry for the Metabolic Profiling of Single Cells

Project Summary The mechanisms underpinning heterogeneous metabolic response between individual cells remain poorly understood, though such mechanisms have ramifications across nearly all of medicine, e.g., disease detection, response to stress, treatment, and more. Intracellular small molecule metabolite, lipid and therapeutic concentrations are often inferred through protein expression or directly measured as the average of 1000’s of cells at once, providing only a population-level view of heterogeneous metabolic response. This obfuscates differentiation of anomalous metabolic cell phenotypes and small molecule associations occurring within cells. Currently there exists a gap in analytical technologies for the measure of small molecules (