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Microfluidic system-based time-course tracking of physical proximity between cells and its effect on gene expression for elucidating live single cancer-immune cell interactions

Flores, B. C. T.; Chawla, S.; Ma, N.; Sanada, C.; Kujur, P. K.; Chinen, L. T. D.; Hukari, K.; Lynch, M.; Ramalingam, N.; Sengupta, D.; Jeffrey, S. S.

2021-11-14 cancer biology
10.1101/2021.11.13.468447 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Cell-cell communication and physical interactions play a vital role in cancer initiation, homeostasis, progression, and immune response. Here, we report a system that combines live capture of different cell types, co-incubation, time-lapse imaging, and gene expression profiling of doublets using a microfluidic integrated fluidic circuit (IFC) that enables measurement of physical distances between cells and the associated transcriptional profiles due to cell-cell interactions. The temporal variations in natural killer (NK) - triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) cell distances were tracked and compared with terminally profiled cellular transcriptomes. The results showed the time-bound activities of regulatory modules and alluded to the existence of transcriptional memory. Our experimental and bioinformatic approaches serve as a proof of concept for interrogating live cell interactions at doublet resolution, which can be applied across different cancers and cell types.

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