J. Gomez-Pastora, J. Kim, M. Weigand, M. Potgieter, N. Walters, E. Reategui, A. Palmer, M. Yazer, M. Zborowski, J.J. Chalmers
The Ohio State University,
United States
Keywords: monocytes, magnetic susceptibility, cell tracking velocimetry
Summary:
The presence of iron in circulating monocytes is well known as they play essential roles in iron recycling. Also, the storage of this metal as well as its incorrect uptake and/or release are important data to diagnose different pathologies. It has been demonstrated that iron storages in human blood cells can be measured through their magnetic behavior with high accuracy, however, the magnetic characteristics of monocytes have not been reported so far to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, in this work, we report, for the first time, the physical and magnetic properties of human monocytes, along with plasma platelets, oxyhemoglobin red blood cells (oxyHb-RBCs) and methemoglobin red blood cells (metHb-RBCs). The different cell populations were separated by Ficoll-density gradient centrifugation, followed by a flow sorting step to isolate monocytes from peripheral blood mononuclear cells. The different fractions were analyzed by Coulter Counter (for determining the size distribution and concentration) and the sorted monocytes were qualitatively analyzed on ImageStream, a state-of-the-art imaging cytometer. The analysis of the Coulter Counter and ImageStream data suggests that although there exists contamination in the monocyte fraction, the integrity of the sorted monocytes appears to be intact and the concentration was high enough to precisely measure their magnetic velocity by Cell Tracking Velocimetry (CTV). Surprisingly, monocytes reported the highest magnetic mobility from the four fractions under analysis, with an average magnetic velocity 7.8 times higher than MetHb-RBCs, which is the only type of cells with positive magnetic velocities. This value is equivalent to a susceptibility 2.5 times higher than the value reported by fresh MetHb-RBCs. It should be noted that this is the first study that reports that a subpopulation of human monocytes is much more magnetic than MetHb-RBCs, opening the door to the possible isolation of human monocytes by label-free magnetic techniques. Also, this contribution reports the risk of using negative magnetic isolation techniques for monocytes, which have been suggested by different researchers, and that will result in the loss of the magnetic subpopulation of monocytes.