High Gradient Magnetic Cell Sorting

Abstract

Magnetic cell sorting has become a universal tool for the isolation of almost any cell type from complex cell mixtures, such as peripheral blood, hematopoietic tissue (spleen, lymph nodes, thymus, bone marrow etc.), non-hematopoietic tissue (solid tumors, epidermis, dermis, liver, thyroid gland, muscle, connective tissue etc.) or cultured cells. The major differences between the magnetic cell separation systems which are currently available are the composition and size of the magnetic particles used for cell labeling and the mode of magnetic separation. Large (0.5–5 μm in diameter) magnetic particles have several disadvantages when compared to small (20–150 nm in diameter) particles (Miltenyi et al., 1990), including a slower kinetic of the cell-bead reaction, a higher degree of non-specific cell-bead interactions, a higher risk of non-specific entrapping of cells in particle aggregates, and adverse effects of particles on viability and optical properties of labelled cells. Here we focus on applications of magnetic cell sorting with the MACS technology (Miltenyi et al., 1990, Radbruch et al., 1994, Kantor et al., 1997) which makes use of small super-paramagnetic particles and high gradient magnetic fields.