Time-course tracking of physical proximity and its effect on gene expression for elucidating single NK and cancer cell interactions using a microfluidic platform

We report a platform that combines the capture, co-incubation, time-lapse imaging, and gene expression profiling of doublets using the microfluidic integrated fluidic circuit (IFC) which could be used for real-time physical and transcriptional cell-cell interaction quantification. The temporal variations in natural killer (NK) - triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) cell distances were tracked and compared with terminally-profiled cellular transcriptomes. The results showed the time-bound activities of regulatory modules and alluded to the existence of transcriptional memory. Our experimental and bioinformatic approaches serve as a proof of concept for interrogating cell interactions at doublet resolution, which can be applicable across different cancer types. Effect of physical proximity on transcriptomic signatures during single NK and cancer cell interactions on a microfluidic platform