A Microfluidic Flow Cytometry with a Uniform Optical Field Enabling Quantitative Analysis of Single-Cell Proteins with Arbitrary Distribution

This paper presented a microfluidic flow cytometry with a uniform optical field, which is capable of translating fluorescent signals of antibodies bound with targeted proteins of single cells into protein numbers regardless of distribution patterns due to volume equivalence. In this study, the uniform optical field for fluorescent excitation and detection was modeled with numerical simulations. Furthermore, the microfluidic flow cytometry with the uniform optical field was used to quantify two key transcriptional factors of OCT4 and c-Myc without specific expression locations within cells from three well-established tumor cell lines of HeLa, A549 and Hep G2, validating the capability of this platform in analyzing single-cell proteins with arbitrary distributions.