Isolation of BOTH cells AND serums from mouse blood - (Oct/16/2012 )

Hello. I am interested in a protocol for isolating from 1 ml of mouse blood BOTH the cells (for flow cytometry) and the serums (for cytokine determination). All protocols take mouse blood for EITHER cells OR serums. This is very wasteful, as the blood is of very little volume.

Surely you could just spin down the cells, then remove the plasma to a fresh tube and treat it to make serum. However, I suppose the risk is that the cells will clot before you can spin them out.

Thanks for the reply. I thought of this idea. In order to avoid the clotting, I thought of spinning down with Heparin. However, I would appreciate if somebody has this experience, and knows if this works, or what concentrations and centrifuge speeds to use.

We also do FACS and cytokine estimation in blood. However we split our samples and collect some in the heparin tubes and most of the blood in the serum separator tubes that BD has.

This is the link to heparin tubes

http://catalog.bd.co...ctNumber=365971. You might be able to collect blood in them and spin the cells down and separate them out avoiding clotting.

zodiac1505 on Thu Oct 18 17:00:33 2012 said:

Yeah, we work only with mice