Microscale Technologies for High-Throughput Analysis of Immune Cells

High-throughput microscale technologies such as next-generation sequencing (NGS), proteomics, and microfluidics-single cell analysis are now being applied for the quantitative analysis of immunological systems. In this chapter we go over several of the new and exciting developments of this emerging field of systems immunology. First, we describe the major advances in transcriptome analysis; this includes microarray technology and RNA sequencing, which have both contributed great insight into the quantitative gene expression profile of immune cells. We also highlight recent progress in combining microfluidics with RNA sequencing for whole transcriptome analysis from single immune cells. High-throughput immune repertoire analysis has also recently become a valuable method for obtaining quantitative information on the diversity and distribution of adaptive immune responses. Therefore, we describe advances in the NGS of antibody repertoires from B cell populations including its combination with microfluidicis-single cell analysis and proteomics technologies. We then describe how these approaches to antibody repertoire analysis have been used for monoclonal antibody discovery and engineering and vaccine profiling. In summary, these high-throughput microscale technologies have already impacted the study of many areas of immunology, including basic mechanisms, clinical and translational immunology, and biotechnology – this will only continue to expand as these technologies become more advanced and accessible.