Circulating microparticles: square the circle.

BACKGROUND: The present review summarizes current knowledge about microparticles (MPs) and provides a systematic overview of last 20 years of research on circulating MPs, with particular focus on their clinical relevance. RESULTS: MPs are a heterogeneous population of cell-derived vesicles, with sizes ranging between 50 and 1000 nm. MPs are capable of transferring peptides, proteins, lipid components, microRNA, mRNA, and DNA from one cell to another without direct cell-to-cell contact. Growing evidence suggests that MPs present in peripheral blood and body fluids contribute to the development and progression of cancer, and are of pathophysiological relevance for autoimmune, inflammatory, infectious, cardiovascular, hematological, and other diseases. MPs have large diagnostic potential as biomarkers; however, due to current technological limitations in purification of MPs and an absence of standardized methods of MP detection, challenges remain in validating the potential of MPs as a non-invasive and early diagnostic platform. CONCLUSIONS: Improvements in the effective deciphering of MP molecular signatures will be critical not only for diagnostics, but also for the evaluation of treatment regimens and predicting disease outcomes.

Mitochondrial staining allows robust elimination of apoptotic and damaged cells during cell sorting.

High-speed fluorescence-activated cell sorting is relevant for a plethora of applications, such as PCR-based techniques, microarrays, cloning, and propagation of selected cell populations. We suggest a simple cell-sorting technique to eliminate early and late apoptotic and necrotic cells, with good signal-to-noise ratio and a high-purity yield. The mitochondrial potential dye, TMRE (tetramethylrhodamine ethyl ester perchlorate), was used to separate viable and non-apoptotic cells from the cell sorting samples. TMRE staining is reversible and does not affect cell proliferation and viability. Sorted TMRE(+) cells contained a negligible percentage of apoptotic and damaged cells and had a higher proliferative potential as compared with their counterpart cells, sorted on the basis of staining with DNA viability dye. This novel sorting technique using TMRE does not interfere with subsequent functional assays and is a method of choice for the enrichment of functionally active, unbiased cell populations.