Distinguishing two populations of cells by TEM - (Jul/22/2015 )

Hey.

I'm planning to do some TEM experiments but I'm facing a problem and have no idea how to solve it (well, I have one idea but that wouldn't be very feasible). I want to mix two populations of cells and analyze their morphology when they are communicating and fusing with each other. I was wondering if there's a way to label the cells previous to mixing in order to distinguish them under the electron microscope.

Any feedback is appreciated! Thanks!
 

I'm sorry I can't help much except for the wild idea of taking your two populations of cells from two similar but different species: like the famous chicken-quail cell experiments by the French scientist Nicole le Douarin. 

You can easily tell the difference between quail cells and chicken ones because quail nuclei are darker because the chromatin is more condensed.

Hey. Thanks for replying. In my case I'm actually mixing two populations of the same species that differ in some genetic aspects. So, morphologically they look the same. I was wondering if there's a label that I could use before mixing the two populations that would be detected in the TEM microscopy later in the experiment.

I'm not quite sure if this is feasible to do it with the TEM, but generally in the EM experiments you could target specific protein that found on one species but not the other, and vice versa. The targeting is employed by recruiting antibodies usually labelled by gold particles, and as far as I know there are several commercial labelling you may be able to use in your experiment.

Thank you for the reply. The problem is that in my case I'm trying to compare two populations of cells from two different strains of the same species. Doing an antibody detection is a possibility, but I was wondering if there is something I could add to the cells before mixing that would allow me to distinguish them under the microscope. Something similar to a fluorescent probe when fluorescence microscopy is used.