Figure 5: Uptake kinetics of doxorubicin in single breast cancer cells and correlation to apoptotic susceptibility.
From: Microfluidic cell isolation technology for drug testing of single tumor cells and their clusters
(a) The top row images show representative images of Dox fluorescence in the nucleus (red) and the bottom row shows the corresponding co-stained images for apoptosis (green) for the same cell inside a droplet. The red box highlights the timepoint at which apoptosis was noted. Based on the Dox concentration after 1 hour of incubation, all cells were categorized in three groups defined as: high ([C]dox > 900 au), medium ([C]dox = 301–900 au) and, low ([C]dox < 300 au). (b) Dox uptake patterns of 118 single cells over 9 hrs. Total 8 different Dox uptake patterns were observed. Heterogeneity of individual MCF-7 cells was observed in terms of intracellular Dox uptake (represented by Dox concentration in arbitrary unit, au). The legends of subplots indicate the type of Dox uptake pattern; where‘d’ and ‘i’ represent decrease and increase in Dox concentration respectively. (c) Distribution of intercellular Dox concentration at four different time points. The red dashed line represents the critical Dox concentration needed for cellular apoptosis delineating the surviving and non-surviving cells.
