Immuno-Hybridization Chain Reaction for Enhancing Detection of Individual Cytokine-Secreting Human Peripheral Mononuclear Cells

We present here a new method to enhance the detection of secreted cytokines and chemokines from single human mononuclear cells. The technique uses a hybridization chain reaction (HCR) to amplify signals resulting from sandwich immunoassays. This immuno-HCR employs oligonucleotide-based initiators covalently linked to antibodies to propagate a chain reaction of hybridization events involving a pair of complementary hairpin oligomers bearing fluorescent labels. Integrating this strategy for signal amplification with microengraving (a soft lithographic method for printing arrays of secreted proteins from thousands of single cells) improves both the limits of detection and sensitivity for cytokines and chemokines captured from individual cells by an average of 200-fold relative to methods for direct detection by fluoresence. This approach should enhance the utility of microengraving for defining the immunological signatures of diseases and responses to interventional therapies based on multiplexed single-cell analysis.