METHOD FOR LABELING INTRACELLULAR AND EXTRACELLULAR TARGETS OF LEUKOCYTES

摘要

The staining of leukocytes with binding agents such as monoclonal antibodiesisan important task, routinely performed in basic research and diagnosticapplications. Known procedures are time consuming and quite labor intensive.Further, there are at least two mandatory centrifugation steps, renderingautomation of the procedure almost impossible. The present invention providesan improved method for the labeling of intracellular and extracellular targetsofleukocytes that is fast and not very labor intensive, does avoid anycentrifugationsteps, allows the use of binding agent cocktails, and can be easily automated.Inparticular, by choosing proper reagent compositions and dilution ratios withregard to each step of adding a solution, all time- and labor-consumingcentrifugation steps can be omitted. Moreover, a soft fixation step maintainsthesurface structures of the leukocytes intact.