FluorATOM: high-throughput imaging flow cytometry for synchronized biophysical and biomolecular phenotyping

Abstract

Multiplexed asymmetric-detection time-stretch optical microscopy (multi-ATOM) has recently been developed to enable high-throughput quantitative phase imaging flow cytometry, from which single-cell biophysical properties can be measured at large scale. However, it lacks the ability to link such biophysical knowledge to biomolecular signatures at the single-cell precision for validation and correlative multi-scale single-cell analysis. We report a high-throughput multimodal system that integrates multi-ATOM with multiplexed 1-D fluorescence imaging/detection, termed FluorATOM; and applied it to perform synchronized biophysical and biomolecular phenotyping of rare breast circulating tumor cells detected in peripheral blood in a mouse xenograft at a throughput of >10,000 cell/sec.