Electrical sensing of single oocytes in microfluidic systems: A mini review

The noninvasive and label-free electrical characterization of single cells is increasingly gaining interest over the last years. Besides cancer cells, oocytes are in the focus of those investigations. The study of oocytes is relevant for two areas: on the one hand, the quality of mammalian oocytes is important in artificial reproduction technology for a high fertilization yield. On the other hand, amphibian oocytes are well established to be used as host cells for the characterization of ion-channel kinetics for drug screening. For both areas, easy-to-perform and reliable characterization techniques are needed. This mini-review summarizes important developments of characterizing oocytes with microfluidic systems in combination with observer-independent noninvasive electrical sensing. Such miniaturized microfluidic systems can be improved to facilitate multiple oocyte characterizations simultaneously for higher throughput screening.