Measurement of the Cell Migration and Cytokine Secretion Activity with Real-Time Imaging System

Immune cells communicate with each other to regulate their activity. Cytokines are humoral proteins secreted and received by specific cells as one of the communication media. Although several single-cell techniques to measure the cytokine secretion have been reported, it is still hard to simultaneously monitor the secretion activity and motility of individual cells composing a cell community. Previously, we have developed the platform of wide-field LCI-S (live-cell imaging for secretion activity) with the open-spaced cell culture chamber on the optical waveguide. We have monitored type2 cytokine secretion and motility from hundreds of ILC2s (Group 2 innate lymphoid cells). Here, we conducted a detailed analysis of the obtained data to reveal the relevance between cell migration patterns and cytokine secretion dynamics of migrating cells. We tracked each cell on bright field images and found two types of cell migration features: directional and random motilities. We also estimated the production amount of the secreted cytokine at each time point by calculating the serial cumulative images of secreted cytokine. By combining these data, we succeeded in examining the relationship between motility and secretion activity. These results demonstrated that wide-field LCI-S has the potential to elucidate immune cells' behavior as a cell population that is regulated by cell-To-cell communication via humoral factors.