I'm growing cancer cells over MSCs on a flask (these cells adhere to MSCs). At a certain point, I need to extract RNA and protein from these cancer cells. The problem is I need to get RNA or protein from only the cancer cells, without having RNA/protein impurities from MSCs.
One method is to detach all cells by Trypsin and use an immunomagnetic bead to separate cancer cells based on a particular CD surface marker, but that could lead to the loss of the cancer cells that do not express this CD marker. Please suggest a method so that I can get all cancer cells from the flask with no MSCs contamination.
If you have BD LSR-II in your place, you can use this technique to separate pure cancer cell populations using fluorescent labeling. SO far I know, this technique is safe and you can further culture these cells after separation. I am also using magnetic beads based sorting. I try to avoid loosing cancer cell by starting the sorting with huge number of cells.
Before Co-culturing the cells, You grow either of the cell population in Cell tracker containing madium (Ex: MSC). Cell tracker enter the cell while growing so that one of that population will be labelled with cell tracker. then you can co-culture cell tracker labelled MSCs and cancer cell. Then trypsinise the cells and sort the cells by FACS based on labelling with cell tracker. Cell trackers are commercially available. I hope this answer may help you!
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