Expansion of single cells into stable clonal cell lines is an important aspect of diverse research applications, including drug discovery, genome editing, and the development of production cell lines in biopharma.
Traditional single-cell cloning methods, such as manual colony picking or limiting dilution into well-plates, are costly, tedious and time consuming. Due to the lack of reliable monoclonality verification, these approaches carry a substantial risk of selecting and propagating non-clonal cells.
Here, we will provide an overview of iotaSciences’ automated single-cell cloning platform which addresses these critical bottlenecks. It utilises a novel fluid-shaping technology to fabricate small-scale cell culture chambers (GRIDs) on polystyrene dishes. Cells are automatically dispensed into individual GRID chambers in sub-microliter volumes and cultivated therein. Due to the optical properties and small chamber size, single cells and their outgrowth into colonies are clearly visible and easy to track throughout the entire process. This allows reliable verification of single-cell clonality directly after cell plating.
