Single-Cell Analysis of Elemental Contents by Laser Ablation–Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry

Elemental analysis at the single-cell level is an emerging technique in the field of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). In comparison to the analysis of cell suspensions by fast time-resolved analysis, single-cell sampling by laser ablation (LA) allows the discriminatory analysis of single cells according to their size and morphology. In this study, we evaluated the changes in elemental contents in a single cell through differentiation of rat adrenal pheochromocytoma into neuron-like cells by LA-ICP-MS. The contents of seven essential minerals were increased about 2–3 times after the differentiation. In addition, we evaluated the degree of differentiation at the single-cell level by means of imaging cytometry after immunofluorescence staining of microtubule-associated protein 2 (Map2), a neuron-specific protein. The fluorescence intensities of Alexa Fluor 488-conjugated secondary antibody against the anti-Map2 primary antibody showed large variations among the cells after the onset of differentiation. Although the average fluorescence intensity was increased through the differentiation, there were still less-matured neuron-like cells that exhibited a lower fluorescence intensity after 5 days of differentiation. Since a positive correlation between the fluorescence intensity and the cell size in area was found, we separately measured the elemental contents in the less-matured smaller cells and well-matured larger cells by LA-ICP-MS. The larger cells had higher elemental contents than the smaller cells, indicating that the essential minerals are highly required at a later stage of differentiation.