Themed collection The ‘Single’ Issue

Professor Henry S. White, Guest Editor of this themed issue on Single Entities, highlights the wealth of information that there is to be gained when analytical chemistry is studied at the “single entity” level.

This review covers recent advances in the sampling and loading of single cells for electrophoretic analysis by interfacing mechanical, microfluidic, and optical techniques to capillary and on-chip electrophoresis instruments.

Attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) with the use of a slide-on germanium accessory followed by chemometric analysis allowed for providing meaningful information about the biochemical composition of a single endothelial cell.

Single AuNP counting in free solution was achieved with flash-lamp darkfield microscopy and applied to highly sensitive DNA hybridization detection based on target DNA induced AuNP aggregation and counts reduction.

High throughput single molecule tracking methods were developed to perform quantitative analyses of rare molecular populations.

A synthetic nanopore can be used to both transfect a single cell and detect secreted analytes.

A single-cell based platform demonstrates the ability to monitor apoptosis and necrosis of cells treated with varying concentrations of three toxicants. Individual cells showed variable responses to a given toxicant, while the averaged cellular response agrees well with those obtained from conventional cytotoxicity assays.

Single nanoparticle plasmonic spectroscopy for real-time in vivo probing of transport and toxicity of single NPs.

A hyphenated optical trap sampling system and a capillary electrophoresis with laser-induced native fluorescence detection system is used for sampling and characterizing the indolamines from individual pinealocytes.

A nanoporous system with a hydrophobic layer at the pore entrance gates transport of ions and water.

This paper aims to promote the combination of microdroplet technology with cell-free cytoskeletal protein expression as tool for biological investigation.

Presented is an optimized FTIR imaging methodology to achieve fast data acquisition with high signal-to-noise ratio for individual live cells in aqueous environments.

We explore the effects of noble metal nanoparticle exposure, with varied size or surface functionality, in murine chromaffin cells using microelectrode amperometry.

Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy was used to assay caspase activity in single apoptotic lymphocytes using a new red-fluorescent probe. Apoptotic cells were detected as early as 30 min after induction.

Peptide cleavage sites occurring during incubation in lysates and single cells were identified and non-native amino acids inserted to stabilize the peptide. Multiple iterative cycles yielded a peptidase-resistant, kinase-substrate peptide.

A fast, simple method for batch fabrication of high-resolution SECM-SICM electrodes and their application in measurement of transport.

We proposed a novel hot cell-direct RT-PCR method and demonstrated single cell RT-PCR for many isolated Jurkat cells using this method on the CD-shaped device for single cell isolation.