Fig. 1. Illustration of the main phases of the single-cell nanobiopsy procedure.

A double-barrel nanopipette integrated into a SICM is brought in proximity of the cellular membrane (A) where it penetrates the latter enabling the release of the fluorophore through the aqueous barrel (B) and cytoplasmic extractions through the organic barrel (C). After the extraction, the sample containing RNA transcripts is released in a lysis buffer and it is reverse-transcribed, amplified, and sequenced for downstream gene expression analysis via bioinformatics (D).