Detection and analysis of low-abundance cell-surface biomarkers using enzymatic amplification in microfluidic droplets.

Finding the few: Cell-surface proteins are useful disease biomarkers, but current high-throughput methods are limited to detecting cells expressing more than several hundred proteins. Enzymatic amplification in microfluidic droplets (see picture) is a high-throughput method for detection and analysis of cell-surface biomarkers expressed at very low levels on individual human cells. Droplet optical labels allow concurrent analysis of several samples.