Proliferation-mediated asymmetric nanoencapsulation of single-cell and motility differentiation

The biointerface engineering of living cells by creating an abiotic shell has important implications for endowing cells with exogenous properties with improved cellular behavior, which then boosts the development of the emerging field of living cell hybrid materials. Herein, we develop a way to perform active nanoencapsulation of single cell, which then endows the encapsulated cells with motion ability that they do not inherently possess. The emerging motion characteristics of the encapsulated cells could be self-regulated in terms of both the motion velocity and orbits by different proliferation modes. Accordingly, by taking advantage of the emergence of differentiated moving abilities, we achieve the self-sorting between mother cells and daughter cells in a proliferated Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell community. Therefore, it is anticipated that our highlighted study could not only serve as a new technique in the field of single-cell biology analysis and sorting such as in studying the aging process in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but also open up opportunities to manipulate cell functionality by creating biohybrid materials to fill the gap between biological systems and engineering abiotic materials.