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The more biologists learn about disease complexity and the power of personalized treatments, the more important it becomes to develop noninvasive and unbiased methods of sorting, separating, and otherwise gathering information about individual cells.
Traditionally, however, sorting cells has been tricky. Methods for accurately and quickly sorting heterogeneous cell populations—even into just the broad categories of malignant or benign—often rely on the use of fluorescent surface labels or biochemical stains, techniques that frequently alter the cells’ properties. And in some applications, researchers simply don’t know which surface markers to track. This means that the cells being studied may not be representative of the specific cell subpopulation of interest.
A new wave of label-free methods is offering researchers ways to identify subgroups of cells in live ...
