blood collection tubes for xenograft exp - (Jan/14/2014 )

Does anybody which blood collection tubes are most commonly used to collect leukemic blasts from patients in order to use these for xenograft experiments in mice? And does it matter? From one lab I heard they prefer ACD tubes but I was wondering whether EDTA tubes are also okay. Most of the time this is not mentioned in the publication so it's hard to find out which is most commonly used.

I am going to answer because no one else has. We use EDTA tubes because it acts as an anticoagulant and chelator, which is great for handling the blood at RT and downstream PCR studies. We have also used citrate tubes and seen no notable difference.  I would say that you wouldn't want to use EDTA because it will chelate any metals that are present in the animals blood stream. That would be the only negative effect of the EDTA as chelation therapy has been approved by the FDA.

If you are a hospital oriented research center it may be beneficial to get into contact with the hospitals chem department and they can walk you through which color cap tube may be best for your studies.  The below link is the only relevant literature I could find on the subject.

http://mujhu.org/home/downloads/plus_plastic_tubes_wallchart_tubeguide_VS5229.pdf

Let me know what you find out as this could benefit me in the future

Thanks for your reply.

I work in a hospital and we get our samples in EDTA tubes (for diagnostic purposes, all kinds of PCR assays). We isolate the white blood cells from the blood and after taking the sample required for the diagnostic tests, we store the left-over in RPMI + DMSO + fetal calf serum. Another group in the hospital also gets some sample from every patient but as they want to use it for xenograft experiments, they ask the clinician to take another sample in ACD tubes (and then also isolatie white blood cells and store these in RPMI+DMSO+FCS). We want to reorganize the stream of samples and see if we can collect all samples in EDTA tubes to avoid fractionating the samples over different labs. But for this reason we have to know whether white blood cells obtained from EDTA tubes are also suitable for xenograft experiments.

The ACD tubes are recommended for HLA phenotyping so presume they are better for cell viability but I don't know if this is very different from EDTA tubes as I only found I paper where they compare the characteristics of white blood cells isolated from EDTA or ACD tubes (Fiscus et al., J Clin Microbiol 2000).

Any insights in this would be appreciated.