Cell Analysis Overview

Cells, the fundamental units of life, exhibit diverse biochemical, biophysical, and collective behaviors essential to biological functions and disease progression. Therefore, it is critical to develop cell analysis approaches. While traditional methods, such as Western blotting, have deepened our understanding of cell biology, they are limited in accuracy, throughput, and single-cell resolution. To overcome these challenges, microfluidics—a technology enabling the precise manipulation of fluids, cells, and molecules at the microscale—has emerged as an enabling tool in next-generation cell analysis. With its profound advantages in feature similarity and biomimicry, microfluidic systems have driven significant scientific advancements and industrial applications in cell analysis. This chapter introduces the fundamentals of cells, traditional cell analysis methods, the transition to microfluidic-based approaches, and concludes with an overview of the book&s;s structure.