Determination of apoptosis sensitivity in specific t cell subsets from human peripheral blood by utilizing a multiparameter fluorescence-activated cell sorting-based technique

: Among the different techniques available for determining physiological cell death or apoptosis in immune cells, fluorescence-activated cell sorting-based approaches prove to be one of the most efficient and quantitative assays in capturing cells that are actively undergoing apoptosis elicited by either extrinsic or intrinsic forms of cell death. The key advantage of the technique is to allow the user to determine apoptotic responses of multiple immune cell types or subsets of the same lineage of immune cells without the prior requirement for cell separation. Here, we describe a "multiparameter" flow method to rapidly determine apoptosis-sensitivity induced by the Fas receptor pathway within different CD4 T cell subsets in a mixed pool of analyzed ex vivo peripheral blood mononuclear cells.