Scientists create new weapon to help fight disease

Researchers at Duke University and Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) in South Korea hope the cell-sorting system will radically change research by allowing the fast, efficient control and separation of individual cells that could then be studied in vast numbers.

‘Most experiments grind up a bunch of cells and analyse genetic activity by averaging the population of an entire tissue rather than looking at the differences between single cells within that population,’ said Benjamin Yellen, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. ‘That’s like taking the eye colour of everyone in a room and finding that the average colour is grey, when not a single person in the room has grey eyes. You need to be able to study individual cells to understand and appreciate small but significant differences in a similar population.’

The study appears online May 14 in Nature Communications.