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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2009 Dec 7.
Published in final edited form as: Cancer Res. 2008 Jul 15;68(14):5529–5532. doi: 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-08-0630

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Quantification of human breast cancer cells in mouse blood samples. A, MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells with or without stable transduction of GFP were added to 100 µL blood samples from mice without tumor xenografts. Samples were fixed, and epithelial cells were enriched by immunomagnetic bead isolation using an antibody-to-epithelial cell adhesion molecule. Recovered cells then were stained with an antibody to cytokeratin (CK8, CK18, and CK19) to identify epithelial cells (CK-PE) and distinguish them from leukocytes stained with CD45 (CD45-APC). Nucleated cells were identified by staining with the fluorescent nucleic acid dye DAPI. GFP in cancer cells was detected in the FITC channel. Representative images of recovered MDA-MB-231 and 231-GFP breast cancer cells. These cells stain positively for CK-PE and DAPI and negatively for CD45-APC. GFP fluorescence in 231-GFP cells is detected in the FITC channel. The merged image of all fluorescent channels is shown as CK-PE/DAPI.