Jeffrey Haug asks: > Has anyone heard of a high speed sorter that "zaps" unwanted cells >with a lethal dose of UV? A friend told me that just such a cytometer was >being developed. Does anyone know this to be true? > "Cell zappers" were independently conceived in several different places in the late 1970's and early 1980's; I got the U. S. Patent on the concept while at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Los Alamos group also played with the idea. As far as I know, the first practical instrument was actually built at the Radiobiological Research Institute in Rijswijk, the Netherlands, by Hans Herweijer, Willem Stokdijk, and Jan Visser (High-speed photodamage cell selection using bromodeoxyuridine/Hoechst 33342 photosensitized cell killing. Cytometry 9:143-9, 1988). Zapping was originally conceived for such applications as purging low levels of cancer cells from marrow prior to autologous transplantation, at a time when the attainable zap rate (up to 50,000 cells/sec) was an order of magnitude higher than the sort rate obtainable using droplet sorting. Advances in stem cell identification and high-speed sorting have since shifted the balance in favor of sorting. More recently, zapping has been advocated and used for chromosome selection; its hard to amplify the unwanted DNA once it has been tied in knots. -Howard
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