Chip-Assisted Single-Cell Biomarker Profiling of Heterogeneous Circulating Tumor Cells Using Multifunctional Nanospheres.

Profiling the heterogeneous phenotypes of individual circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from patients is a very challenging task, but it paves new ways for cancer management, especially personalized anticancer therapy. Herein, we propose a chip-assisted multifunctional-nanosphere system for efficient and reliable biomarker phenotype analysis of individual heterogeneous CTCs. Red fluorescent magnetic biotargeting multifunctional nanospheres and green fluorescent biotargeting nanospheres targeting to two kinds of CTC biomarkers are used for convenient dual-fluorescence labeling of CTCs along with magnetic tags.

Integrating optical tweezers with up-converting luminescence: a non-amplification analytical platform for quantitative detection of microRNA-21 sequences.

We report a single-microsphere based imaging assay method by integrating up-converting luminescence with optical tweezers for detecting microRNA-21 sequences. This method achieves a competitive detection limit of 12 fM with good selectivity and no dedicated signal amplification designs.