Approaches to understanding Metabolism at the Single Cell. Single-cell dissection and microdroplet chemistry.

The unique roles of individual cells may be critical to the physiology of an organism. In such cases, micromethods are essential to elucidating the molecular biology, biochemistry and biophysics of the specialized cells or even subcellular compartments of the important cells. The great proliferation of micromethods testifies to their value and no single review can be comprehensive. This review therefore provides only a generalized overview of one approach, namely dissection that provides a pure sample for subsequent extraction and analysis by microdroplet chemistry. As a means of illustrating the utility of this approach, an application—study of the interaction of cytosolic malate concentration and guard-cell phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase—is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]