More Tales from the Lab
Over the Halloween weekend:
A friend was running this life/death assay on (some mammalian) cells. Cells which are dead will stain red; live ones will stain green. Then what she got was two sets of cells - one group staining both red and green, and the other doesn't stain at all.
We called the first set the living dead, and the second the ghosts.
Later she found out that she didn't add enough of the fluorescent dye.
2 comments:
Cells which are dead will stain red - dead giveaway for propidium iodide stain.
But what's the green one?
Actually for the live/dead kit the red is ethidium homodimer, while the green is calcein.
You might want to optimize the concentration of red and green reagents by having cells you know are dead (fix in ethanol or something) and ones you know are alive and do diff concentrations of each and see where the dead ones are purely red. The live ones are purely green.
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