It is possible to detect intracellular cytokine in a small percentage of ex vivo cells where they have been activated in vivo, following exactly the same fixation,permabilisation and labelling techniques used for stimulated cells. However, what question this would answer is not clear, as these cells would represent only a fraction of the total actually "programmed" to express this cytokine by the in vivo environment. In other words, you would detect only those cells which just happened to contain cytokine in their cytoplasm at the moment you fixed them. Several of the papers in the literature do employ brief stimulation in the presence of a stimulation inhibitor of ex vivo cells: Picker LJ et al in "Blood" 1994 is one of the earlier ones. Dearbhaile O Donnell University College Dublin
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