Novel Microtechnology System for Cytometric Analysis of Adherent Cell Populations

The increasing appreciation of tissue cellular heterogeneity and recent identification of rare cell populations within tissues that are associated with specific biological behaviors, e.g., progenitor cells, has illuminated a limitation of current technologies to study such adherent cells directly from primary tissues. The micropallet array is a recently-developed technology designed to address this limitation by virtue of its capacity to isolate and recover single adherent cells on individual micropallets [1]. Micropallet arrays consist of hundreds of thousands of microscale polymer pedestals (“micropallets”) uniformly arrayed on a glass microscope slide. The micropallets are made from a high aspect photopolymerizable polymer using photolithographic methods. Cells are applied to the arrays and fall stochastically upon its surface, with single cells adhering to individual micropallets. Cells are then analyzed in situ and single, unperturbed cells can be selected and collected from the array by releasing the underlying micropallets using a focused pulsed laser.