Phagocytosis and digestion of pH-sensitive fluorescent dye (Eos-FP) transfected E. coli in whole blood assays from patients with severe sepsis and septic shock.

The function of phagocytic and antigen presenting cells is of crucial importance to sustain immune competence against infectious agents as well as malignancies. We here describe a reproducible procedure for the quantification of phagocytosis by leukocytes in whole blood. For this, a pH-sensitive green-fluorescent protein- (GFP) like dye (Eos-FP) is transfected into infectious microroganisms.

Cultivation of fetal erythroid precursors from maternal blood: isolation and characterization by PCR and FISH.

Cultivation of fetal progenitor cells from maternal blood offers the opportunity to produce sufficient fetal cells for prenatal molecular genetic and cytogenetic analysis. For in vitro cultivation, 10 ml of blood was collected from 22 women carrying a male fetus. After triple-density gradient centrifugation, the mononucleated cells were cultivated for 10 to 14 days in special hematopoietic growth medium.