The establishment of monoclonal, stably transduced cell lines is a critical step in functional genomics and drug discovery. However, conventional methods are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to compromising cell viability. Here, we present a microfluidic single-cell sorting system based on laser-induced jetting (LIJet) that significantly improves the efficiency and quality of stable cell line generation. This system integrates a light-responsive substrate with metal coating and a PDMS microfluidic chip featuring an array of microwells, enabling single-cell capture, identification, and non-contact precision release. A 532 nm nanosecond pulsed laser is used to generate localized microjets, which accurately eject target cells from the microwells. In addition to achieving a 100% sorting success rate and maintaining over 95.3% post-sorting cell viability, the system supports long-term on-chip culture and viral transduction with full real-time monitoring. We demonstrated the platform's functionality by performing on-chip ZsGreen lentiviral transduction of human lung adenocarcinoma PC9 cells, followed by fluorescence-based single-cell selection, ultimately establishing monoclonal cell lines with stable transgene expression. This platform offers notable advantages in low-damage manipulation, dynamic monitoring, and functional perturbation, providing a robust and efficient solution for the construction of stably transduced cell lines, gene function screening, and phenotypic analysis across a variety of biomedical applications.
Chen et al. (Fri,) studied this question.