Flow cytometry: An aid in monitoring lymphocyte transformation in whole blood cultures

A combination of whole blood cultures, hypotonic fluorescent staining of nucleated cells, and flow cytometry resulted in a greatly improved technique for measuring lymphocyte blastogenesis. Sample preparation was reduced to two steps with no centrifugation. The technique was successfully used to analyze blood cultures derived from experimentally and naturally infected cows. The technique was also shown to be ideally suited for analyzing lymphocytes cultured in whole blood cultures and (1) avoids the problems of tritiated thymidine analysis and (2) provides a direct analysis of the number of cells responding to antigenic stimulation.