Re: quantitation of fetal cells by flow
Howard Shapiro (hms@shapirolab.com)
Wed, 26 Jun 1996 20:11:16 -0400 (EDT)
The query to which you replied was the 2nd or 3rd casual request I've seen
on the Mailing List for a pat answer to an unsolved and very difficult
problem. Fetal cells in maternal blood are very rare events, and there are
several top rate labs - Diana Bianchi's in Boston and Dorothy Lewis' in
Houston come to mind - working really hard to develop methods which will
probably be practical only for almost equivalently high powered labs. Yes,
fetal cells are different in their membrane and antigenic characteristics,
and they have been isolated (the first confirmatory PCR, identifying
Y-chromosome-bearing fetal cells, was done in Diana's all-female lab,
eliminating the possibility that a flake of male dandruff would produce a
false positive result). There is a recent volume of Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences largely devoted to the topic. I don't think there's a
brand new, quick and dirty method out there; anything which was discovered
in the past year is likely to remain secret until patents are filed.
-Howard
CD ROM Vol 2 was produced by staff at the Purdue University Cytometry Laboratories
and distributed free of charge as an educational service to the cytometry community.
If you have any comments please direct them to Dr. J. Paul Robinson, Professor & Director, PUCL,
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907. Phone:(317) 494-0757; FAX (317) 494-0517; Web http://www.cyto.purdue.edu
EMAIL robinson@flowcyt.cyto.purdue.edu
