Figure 5.

The use of CEE-Enhanced to improve detection of cells on the microchannel. (a) A clinical breast cancer CTC stained for CK and nuclear-stained with DAPI. This cell is weakly CK positive. (b) The same cell after subsequent stain with CE labeled with the same AlexaFLuor-488 fluorophore in order to enhance the stain intensity. (c) SKOV cell spiked into blood and recovered on the microchannel using an antibody mixture (see Section 2). Cells on the channels were stained with CE-488 and DAPI. The four WBCs stained blue for DAPI only, while the SKOV (attached to post) can be detected only with CE (green). This higher contrast image shows the outline of the posts in the microchannel. Together these images show that CE can be used to augment weakly staining CK cells or can be used to detect cells without CK stain.