Microfluidic platforms for plant cells studies

Conventional methods of plant cell analysis rely on growing plant cells in soil pots or agarose plates, followed by screening the plant phenotypes in traditional greenhouses and growth chambers. These methods are usually costly, need a large number of experiments, suffer from low spatial resolution and disorderly growth behavior of plant cells, with lack of ability to locally and accurately manipulate the plant cells. Microfluidic platforms take advantage of miniaturization for handling small volume of liquids and providing a closed environment, with the purpose of in vitro single cell analysis and characterizing cell response to external cues. These platforms have shown their ability for high-throughput cellular analysis with increased accuracy of experiments, reduced cost and experimental times, versatility in design, ability for large-scale and combinatorial screening, and integration with other miniaturized sensors. Despite extensive research on animal cells within microfluidic environments for high-throughput sorting, manipulation and phenotyping studies, the application of microfluidics for plant cells studies has not been accomplished yet. Novel devices such as RootChip, RootArray, TipChip, and PlantChip developed for plant cells analysis, with high spatial resolution on a micrometer scale mimicking the internal microenvironment of plant cells, offering preliminary results on the capability of microfluidics to conquer the constraints of conventional methods. These devices have been used to study different aspects of plant cell biology such as gene expression, cell biomechanics, cellular mechanism of growth, cell division, and cells fusion. This review emphasizes the advantages of current microfluidic systems for plant science studies, and discusses future prospects of microfluidic platforms for characterizing plant cells response to diverse external cues.