The engineering power of microfluidics delivers platforms to study the human microbiome

The microbe populations that cohabit our bodies are called the microbiome. Disruption to the human microbiome can cause diseases like digestive disorders, making it important to understand how the microbiome functions. Valuable mechanistic information is hidden within single microbes, which traditional investigative methods do not have the resolution to assess. An engineer and biologist have co-written a review of the current microfluidic platforms for single-cell microbiome studies in Biomicrofluidics.

“Microfluidics opens the door to observing microbes in their natural environment, or much closer to their natural environment, at a single cell level,” said co-author Marina Walther-Antonio.

Microfluidics has been used extensively to analyze eukaryotic cells on a single cell level, but microbes, with their smaller size and tough cell walls, have proven more challenging. There are both advantages and disadvantages of microstructure, dielectrophoresis and droplet-based microfluidic cultivation techniques, described alongside the advancements in whole genome, gene expression and metabolic activity microfluidic platforms.

The authors emphasized that the strengths of individual platforms could be combined by an integration of methods to offer a versatile platform for systematic microbiome studies. The review also highlighted the potential role of microfluidics’ fast and sensitive detection of bacteria in diagnostics, which could turn 48-hour diagnostics into real-time tests for clinical use. Walther-Antonio compared the speed of these diagnostics to over-the-counter pregnancy tests.

The group uses traditional microbiome techniques and a precise optical microfluidic system in tumor microbiome studies. Co-author Yuguang Liu develops single-cell technologies to answer clinical needs and hopes that this review will raise awareness of the opportunity for collaboration between engineers and microbiologists in this area.

Source: “Microfluidics: A new tool for microbial single cell analyses in human microbiome studies,” by Yuguang Liu and Marina Walther-Antonio, Biomicrofluidics (2017). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5002681 .