Instrumentation of hollow fiber flow field flow fractionation for selective cell elution

Hollow fiber flow field flow fractionation (HF5) columns can be built with minimized cost and instrumental skills by incorporation of commercial hollow fibers into holders made of classical chromatographic tubing and connectors. The proposed design leads to differential elution of human cells of different origin. Suspensions of red blood cells (RBC) and adherent human colorectal cancer (CRC) cell lines were used. These CRC nucleated population have been linked to cell-to-cell and cell to instrument interactions that are limiting factors in terms of recovery and viability. These interactions can be limited depending on injection/elution conditions. By using RBC we observed that the focalization/relaxation step played a major role in the elution process. However, HF5 opens a large potential, which completes the diversity shown by SdFFF in cell sorting methodologies and technologies. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.