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A parallel microfluidic flow cytometer for high-content screening

Abstract

A parallel microfluidic cytometer (PMC) uses a high-speed scanning photomultiplier-based detector to combine low-pixel-count, one-dimensional imaging with flow cytometry. The 384 parallel flow channels of the PMC decouple count rate from signal-to-noise ratio. Using six-pixel one-dimensional images, we investigated protein localization in a yeast model for human protein misfolding diseases and demonstrated the feasibility of a nuclear-translocation assay in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells expressing an NFκB-EGFP reporter.

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Figure 1: High-content screening on a PMC.
Figure 2: Phenotyping α-Syn–GFP aggregation by PMC imaging.

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Acknowledgements

We thank B. Bevis and S. Lindquist (Whitehead Institute) for helpful conversations and for supplying the S. cerevisiae samples. This work was supported by US National Institutes of Health (grant R01 HG-001389).

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Authors

Contributions

B.K.M., J.G.E., M.C.C. and D.J.E. designed the research; B.K.M., M.C.C., J.G.E. and D.J.E. performed the engineering and experiments; B.K.M. and M.C.C. wrote analytical software and performed the data analysis; and all authors contributed to writing the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel J Ehrlich.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Figures 1–14, Supplementary Table 1 (PDF 4763 kb)

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McKenna, B., Evans, J., Cheung, M. et al. A parallel microfluidic flow cytometer for high-content screening. Nat Methods 8, 401–403 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.1595

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