Re: PI Staining

From: Ryan Hung (rhung@vcn.bc.ca)
Date: Thu Jul 10 1997 - 17:18:28 EST


On Wed, 9 Jul 1997, John Ladasky wrote:
> 	Unlike monoclonal antibodies, PI has a fairly high off rate.  So
> having excess stain in the solution helps to keep all of the binding sites
> of the DNA saturated, thus facilitating DNA quantitation.  If you just want
> to distinguish live cells from dead cells, you can probably get away with
> washing away the excess PI.  But not for long -- after a few hours the dead
> cells would not fluoresce significantly more than the live ones.

Hmm, is this true for unwashed cells as well?  I've been using a one-step
hypotonic lysing buffer that contains PI (50 ug/ml), but I've been varying
the time (up to several hours) before reading on the FACS scanner.  As
such, would the PI saturate all nuclei, giving a reduced amount of
hypodiploid fluoresence and sending everything up to the G0/G1 peak (thus 
giving abnormally low levels of apoptosis)?

							Ryan.

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