THE ANALYSIS OF SINGLE CELLS

Abstract

There are a number of problems which would be furthered if means were available for analyzing single mammalian cells or other structures of comparable size. In the central nervous system, for example, there exists a wide variety of large and small single cell bodies (0.0001 to 0.05 y dry weight) which are enmeshed in nervous tissue of completely different histological structure. The isolation and analysis of these individual cell bodies might be helpful in understanding the chemistry of the nervous system. For some time it has been possible to make rough measurements of a few enzymes in large single nerve cell bodies (1). However, the methods were unsatisfactory in regard to precision, and fragments of tissue of known composition which were equal in size to single nerve cell bodies gave low results. After considerable study the rather interesting reasons for the inaccuracies have been found. Consequently it is now quite simple to obtain reproducible and accurate values for a number of enzymes with samples of 0.01 y dry weight and it is more than likely that samples 100 times smaller may be analyzed for several enzymes at least.