CAMBRIDGE, MA, AND PARIS, FRANCE, 12 October, 2017 – HiFiBiO and collaborators describe the application of droplet microfluidics to characterize immune responses at the single-cell level in work published in Nature Biotechnology.

Eyer et al‘s paper, “Single-cell deep phenotyping of IgG-secreting cells for high-resolution immune monitoring” describes DropMap, “a powerful and elegant technology for the phenotypic analysis of antibody-secreting cells (ASCs) at the single-cell level with unprecedented throughput and resolution” according to the corresponding News & Views article by McDaniel et al.

Abstract of Paper:
Studies of the dynamics of the antibody-mediated immune response have been hampered by the absence of quantitative, high-throughput systems to analyze individual antibody-secreting cells. Here we describe a simple microfluidic system, DropMap, in which single cells are compartmentalized in tens of thousands of 40-pL droplets and analyzed in two-dimensional droplet arrays using a fluorescence relocation-based immunoassay. Using DropMap, we characterized antibody-secreting cells in mice immunized with tetanus toxoid (TT) over a 7-week protocol, simultaneously analyzing the secretion rate and affinity of IgG from over 0.5 million individual cells enriched from spleen and bone marrow. Immunization resulted in dramatic increases in the range of both single-cell secretion rates and affinities, which spanned at maximum 3 and 4 logs, respectively. We observed differences over time in dynamics of secretion rate and affinity within and between anatomical compartments. This system will not only enable immune monitoring and optimization of immunization and vaccination protocols but also potentiate antibody screening.