Stem Cell Isolation Technology
With stem cell technology in the public eye, it should be noted that a number of products for stem cell research are on the marketplace. BD Biosciences, a division of Becton Dickinson, has a range of kits, individual reagents, flow cytometry and bioimaging instrumentation, and cell culture environments for advancing cell-based technologies.
BD Biosciences just introduced the BD™ mouse hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell (HSPC) isolation kit. According to Julia Lizondo, product manager of stem cell research reagents, the kit contains the reagents required for the flow cytometric isolation of hematopoietic progenitor and stem cells from mouse bone marrow samples.
The four-color kit consists of pretitrated fluorochrome conjugated antibodies, compensation beads, isotype controls, an Fc blocker, and a viability dye. In addition to the mouse HSPC isolation kit, BD Biosciences offers the BD™ human pluripotent stem cell sorting and analysis kit.
Intelligent Cells Wired for Assays
Roche Diagnostics’ xCELLigence System has a microelectronic biosensor built into each well of a standard 96-well microtiter plate, says Burkhard Ziebolz, Ph.D., head of global communication. This allows any change in cell number, cell morphology, or cell attachment to be detected in real-time, without the need for labeling or reporters.
Roche has introduced instrumentation for reading the plates, the first of which was the xCELLigence RTCA SP device followed by a newer upgrade, the xCELLigence RTCA MP Instrument. The MP Instrument has a higher throughput capacity and is more versatile, featuring six E-Plate 96’s as opposed to only one in the RTCA SP. Since each E-Plate can be individually manipulated, a number of researchers can work simultaneously, making the device useful for pharmaceutical investigations.