Microfluidic single‐cell multiomics analysis

Abstract

Abstract Cellular heterogeneity is essential to biological processes, such as embryonic development, cell differentiation, and the progression of disease. Recent years have seen the development of a variety of single‐cell multiomics technologies that systemically codetect the genome, epigenome, transcriptome, and proteome for single‐cell heterogeneity evaluation comprehensively. Microfluidics has emerged as a significant tool for single‐cell multiomics techniques, enabling the analysis of the complex regulatory network associated with genome coding, epigenome regulation, and transcriptome/proteome expression in a single cell with increased detection sensitivity, accuracy, throughput, and integration. A review of state‐of‐the‐art microfluidic single‐cell multiomics analysis is presented here. Various microfluidics for isolating single cells are introduced first, highlighting their advantages, disadvantages, and applications in single‐cell sequencing. Then, a comprehensive overview of microfluidic single‐cell multiomics techniques is provided. In addition, a brief introduction of single‐cell multiomics analysis in biological applications and clinical settings will be presented. Finally, we will conclude by discussing the future challenges and prospects of this field.

Keywords

• cellular heterogeneity
• microfluidics
• multiomics analysis
• single cell