Begin by placing the frozen dissociated embryonic heart cell suspension containing cryo vials in a 37 degrees Celsius water bath for one to two minutes. Add one milliliter of complete medium, pre warmed at 37 degrees Celsius to the thawed suspension and mix it three times with a pipette. Then transfer the suspension to a 15 milliliter conical tube, containing 10 millimeters of warm complete medium.
Pass the entire cell suspension over a 30 micrometer strainer and rinse the strainer with one to two milliliters of warm, complete medium. Collect the flow through in the same conical tube. Next, centrifuge the tubes at 300 G for five minutes.
After removing the supernatant, wash the pellet with PBS and transfer the cell suspension into a 1.5 milliliter micro tube. Centrifuge the cell suspension and add 100 microliters of the provided magnetic microbeads to the pelleted cells. Homogenize the suspension five times using a wide boar pipette tip before 15 minutes of incubation at room temperature.
In the meantime, rinse the magnetic separation column with 500 microliters of binding buffer. Once the incubation is complete, dilute the microbead cell suspension mixture using 500 microliters of binding buffer. Next, add 0.6 milliliters of the cell suspension to the magnetic separation column.
Collect the live cell effluent in a 15 milliliter centrifuge tube. Next, rinse the 1.5 milliliter micro tube that contained the cell suspension using one milliliter of binding buffer. After rinsing, transfer the binding buffer from the 1.5 milliliter micro tube to the column and collect the effluent in the same 15 milliliter tube.
Repeat the rinsing of the 1.5 milliliter tube using one milliliter of binding buffer. After centrifuging the effluent at 300 G for five minutes, remove the supernatant without disrupting the cell pellet. Add one milliliter of the PBS BSA solution and gently mix by pipetting using a wide orifice pipette tip.
Then transfer the cell suspension into a 1.5 milliliter micro tube. Again, centrifuge the cell suspension and remove the supernatant without disrupting the cell pellet. Repeat the two washes of one milliliter of PBS BSA.
After removing the one milliliter of PBS BSA, resuspend the cells in 100 microliters of PBS BSA solution. Mix it by pipetting 10 times. Determine the concentration by performing a trypan blue assay to ensure a cell count of more than or equal to 100, 000 cells and perform a fluorescence based assessment for the viability of the cells.
The additional step of sorting and removing the dead cells after thawing allowed the procurement of a cleaner cell suspension with significantly higher cell viability and improved the quality of the starting sample. For more accuracy, two different counting methods were used to quantify the cells and nuclei, including trypan blue and the fluorescence based assessment of the viability. In this protocol, it was observed that the cell viability passed from 80 to 90%before nuclei isolation to less than 5%after nuclei isolation.
