Flow cytometric detection of spontaneous apoptosis in human breast cancer using the TUNEL-technique.

Microscopic detection of structural alterations is the most reliable method to identify apoptotic cells, which however, does not allow any correlation with cell cycle phases. Discrimination of individual cells within solid human tumors undergoing apoptotic death is possible by flow cytometry where apoptotic cells appear in a hypodiploid sub G0/1-peak as a consequence of partial DNA loss. To refer induction of apoptosis to cell cycle phases we adopted the terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase nick-end-labelling (TUNEL) technique to flow cytometry which enables the detection of cellular DNA content and DNA fragmentation by multiparametric analysis.