Microscopy can help see cells, but isolating specific cells is still difficult. In red, dehydrated red blood cells; in blue, a white blood cell. Image credit: Anne Weston, Francis Crick Institute (CC BY-NC 4.0).
When scientists use microscopes to look at cells, they often want to then isolate certain cells based on how these look like. For example, researchers may want to select cells with specific shapes, movements or division rates, because these visual clues give important information about how the cells may be behaving in the body. However, it remains difficult to precisely pick a few live cells within a bigger sample.
To address this problem, Binan et al. created a new approach, called single cell magneto-optical capture (scMOCa), to set aside specific cells within a larger population. The technique uses the lasers present on confocal microscopes to attach tiny metallic beads to the surface of chosen cell. Then, a magnetic field is applied to gently pull the cell to a new location. The method is cheap – it relies on commonly available research tools – and it works on a broad variety of cells. In the future, scMOCa could be used to capture and then grow cells that can only be recognized by how they look or behave, which will help to study them in greater details.
