Good news about Greta Leonavičienė, a young researcher at the VU Life Sciences Center: the first is that her research paper has won the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences (LAS) Young Scientists and PhD Students' Research Paper Competition and a prize; the other is that she has succesfully defended her doctoral thesis!
This year, two VU LSC researchers have been awarded prizes in the LAS Young Scientists and Doctoral Researchers Competition. G. Leonavičienė was awarded the prize for her research paper "Complex single-cell analysis using hydrogel microcapsules".
The young researchert also defended her dissertation based on this work. The scientific supervisor of the dissertation is Prof. Linas Mažutis.
What is her research work about?
Biological samples, even with a small number of cells, are usually characterised by phenotypic and genotypic heterogeneity. Unravelling this heterogeneity is an important task for understanding the differences between cells, their properties and biological functions. This often requires detailed analysis of the sample at the single cell level using complex (multilevel) molecular biology techniques. However, due to existing technological limitations, this type of research remains a major challenge.
This PhD thesis presents a practical and innovative solution to perform complex single-cell analysis with high throughput. This has been achieved by the development of selectively permeable microcapsules. Microcapsules are water droplets of picoliter to nanoliter volume encased in a thin hydrogel shell. The hydrogel shell acts as a selectively permeable membrane: isolated cells and biomolecules of high molecular weight (gDNA, iRNA) are retained, while smaller molecules (enzymes, oligonucleotides, components of the nutrient medium) move by diffusion. This permeability allows a variety of assays to be carried out by transferring microcapsules from one reaction tube to another. In this work, the use of microcapsules has been demonstrated in single bacterial genome amplification, multiplexed AT-PCR, RNA sequencing and cell culturing, which is expected to be a useful tool for the development of further single cell analysis methods.