TY - JOUR T1 - Microfluidic system-based time-course tracking of physical proximity between cells and its effect on gene expression for elucidating live single cancer-immune cell interactions JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2021.11.13.468447 SP - 2021.11.13.468447 AU - Bianca C. T. Flores AU - Smriti Chawla AU - Ning Ma AU - Chad Sanada AU - Praveen Kumar Kujur AU - Ludmilla T. D. Chinen AU - Kyle Hukari AU - Mark Lynch AU - Naveen Ramalingam AU - Debarka Sengupta AU - Stefanie S. Jeffrey Y1 - 2021/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/14/2021.11.13.468447.abstract N2 - Cell-cell communication and physical interactions play a vital role in cancer initiation, homeostasis, progression, and immune response. Here, we report a system that combines live capture of different cell types, co-incubation, time-lapse imaging, and gene expression profiling of doublets using a microfluidic integrated fluidic circuit (IFC) that enables measurement of physical distances between cells and the associated transcriptional profiles due to cell-cell interactions. 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 live cell interactions at doublet resolution, which can be applied across different cancers and cell types.Competing Interest StatementK.H and N.R. are employees and stockholders of Fluidigm Corporation. M.L is a former employee and stockholder of Fluidigm Corporation. D.S. is a partner and equity holder at CareOnco Biotech Pvt. Ltd. S.S.J. serves as a scientific advisor for Quantumcyte and Ravel Biotechnology. ER -