I am trying to isolate neutrophils from rat whole blood, aprox. 5 mL collected via cardiac puncture into syringes containing 1mL ACD. I am pipetting whole blood directly onto 5 mL of Histopaque 1.077 and centrifuging for 40 min at 22C at 800g with 0 brake. I then pipet off the superntant layer of histopaque, plasma, and monocytes, and then proceed to RBC lysis of the lower RBC/granulocyte layer. My problems start there: the RBCs of rat blood seem to be almost impossible to lyse. I want to accomplish this without disturbing and activating the neutrophils, but no matter how many washes or lysis steps I include they seem to accumulate and will not fully lyse. Furthermore, I'm having a really hard time getting any sort of decent WBC pellet. 

Sometimes I have to run several dozen samples at a time so I would rather not do a Histopaque 1119/1077 gradient because it is very time consuming to set up. 

I have experimented with the histopaque 11191/077 gradient mentioned above, as well as dextran sedimentation with no success. 

At this point I would be content with just developing a protocol that only lysis RBCs, leaving an enriched population of all leukocytes. I've had some success with using a lysis buffer and Restore buffer, followed by a wash with PBS and then ACK lysis buffer, but this seems like a lot of lysing steps that could potentially activate my nuetrophils. 

I've been very successful with neutrophil isolation from cow and sheep whole blood using Percoll 1.084, but rat blood has given me a lot more headaches. 

My downstream application is western blotting - my final step in the cell isolation protocol is lysis with RIPA Buffer + protease/phosphatase inhibitor.

Any help would be much appreciated!

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