Microfluidic single-cell technology in immunology and antibody screening

Abstract

Single-cell technology has a major impact on the field of immunology. It enables the kinetics and logic of immune signaling and immune cell migration to be elucidated, facilitates antibody screening and allows massively parallelized analysis of B- and T-cell repertoires. Impressive progress has been made over the last decade, strongly boosted by microfluidic approaches. In this review, we summarize the most powerful microfluidic systems based on continuous flow, nanowells, valves and droplets and we analyze their benefits for phenotypic characterization, drug discovery and next generation sequencing experiments. We describe current limitations and provide an outlook on important future applications.