Our experiments use cells from patients with leukemia. These primary cells are notoriously difficult to culture, especially long term. To overcome this, we are using a co-culture system where we grow the leukemia cells with mouse stromal cells (OP9) to try to mimic some aspects of the bone marrow environment present in leukemia. Although essential for maintenance of leukemia cells, the stromal cells can complicate many of the analyses that are required to establish the effective targeting of the leukemia cells. To get around this, we introduced fluorescent markers in the OP9 cells to easily distinguish the stromal cells from the patient cells in various applications such as microscopy and flow cytometry. For full experimental details, please visit Zenodo.
Figure 1: mCherry and GFP labelled OP9 cells. Image generated using IncuCyte live cell imager.
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