Current bench-top cell separation approaches (e.g., fluorescence activated cell sorting1, laser capture micro-dissection2, immuno-magnetic bead separation1) can take several hours of preparation and sorting. These large time scales can affect physiological response and expression levels, resulting in analyses that are not representative of the physiological response3. Systems are needed that can rapidly and efficiently isolate specific cell types without disrupting cell-surface receptor-levels in order to improve cell isolation and enrichment for biomedical applications. Therefore, the rationale for our approach is to develop a gentle approach for cell isolation.
The "lab on a chip" concept offers the promise of orders of magnitude quicker (hours-to-minutes) cell isolation, and most frequently involves capturing cells onto a surface and releasing cells or intracellular contents through physical4,5 or chemical methods6. Although these approaches offer a few advantages such as identifying protein7,8 expression, identifying RNA expression9-11, or even providing cells for in vitro culture12,13, many of these techniques cannot be translated to diagnostics such as cell receptor profiling due to their non-physiological environments. Enzymatic lifting agents such as collagenases can also affect these receptor quantities14,15, meaning cell receptor quantification techniques that use these lifting agents will not generate accurate physiological data. Cellular lysis prevents differentiation between the native surface receptors, and those which were previously internalized16. This protocol describes a fast and gentle approach for cell isolation.