Interest in biological studies on various cell types for many biomedical applications, from research to patient treatments,
is constantly increasing. The ability to discriminate (sort) and/or quantify distinct subpopulations of cells has become increasingly
important. For instance, not only detection but also the highest depletion of neoplastic cells from normal cells is an important
requisite in the autologous transplantation of lymphocytes for blood cancer treatments. In this work, gravitational field-flow
fractionation (GrFFF) is shown to be effective for sorting a heterogeneous mixture of human, living lymphocytes constituted
of neoplastic B cells from a Burkitt lymphoma cell line and healthy T and B lymphocytes from blood samples. GrFFF does not
require the use of fluorescent immunotags for sorting cells, and the sorted cells can be collected for their further characterization.
Flow cytometry was used to assess the viability of the cells collected, and to evaluate the cell fractionation achieved. A
low amount of neoplastic B lymphocytes (less than 2%) was found in a specific fraction obtained by GrFFF. The high depletion
from neoplastic cells (more than 98%) was confirmed by a clonogenicity test.
Keywords Gravitational field-flow fractionation - Cell sorting - Lymphocytes