There are several  ways to examine macrophage apoptosis but i think Annexin/PI staining is likely the easiest way to do this. (http://www.jci.org/articles/view/37262)  

However, you could also look at caspace 3 http://www.jimmunol.org/content/172/3/1907.full.html

I hope this helps. 

Dear Mehdi, 

Monocytes are deficient in base excision repair. Every chemical compound that induces DNA lesions that are repaired by BER are likely to induce apoptosis, So using tBOOH as a ROS surrogate will induce apoptosis in monocytes. 

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/52/21105.long

cheers

HI, to induce apoptosis in monocytes

cheapest and easiest method for these cells is serum starvation.

Induction of apoptosis using other methods i.e. fas receptor, gamma irradiation, ultraviolet light (UV); and crosslinking of surface Fas receptor to list a few

to detect apoptosis/cell death

one way is Annexin V staining along with PI ( for dead cells)

another way is to extract DNA from your cells and just do a standard electrophoresis of your samples. Laddering of the DNA will indicate degraded DNA seen in  apoptotic/dying cells.

I hope that helps

Dear Mehdi,

depend what kind of monocytes you willing to use, if they are J779, RAW  cell lines from mice are different from human whole blood cells, please make clear what kinds of cells you are working.

In general, Do slower starvation of RPMI1640 by using  5 and then 1% FCS in medium, otherwise for fast you can able to use NP40 as making apoptosis and toxicity to cells.

good luck

Dear Dr

I think it depends on which context do you want to work, with monocyte derived dendritic cells, macrophage,from a lukemia cell line or for example budy fluid ?

Here I tried to address some of them,I hope it will be useful...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15691299

http://www.jimmunol.org/content/163/6/3484.full

http://www.jimmunol.org/content/172/8/5103.full.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18690650