Cytometry in cardiovascular research

Abstract

Almost 150 years after Rudolf Virchow's first publication on Cellularpathologie in 1859 (Virchow, 1859), cytological analyses still plays a fundamental role in clinical routine and decision-making. Besides conventional histology and cytology, cytometric assays are established standard procedures for numerous applications. Cytometry is a technological and analytical approach to quantitatively and rapidly analysing individual cells in heterogeneous populations, in order to stoichiometrically determine their constituents, which have been labelled with fluorescent dyes. The general principle of cytometric analysis is that, for a high number of individual cells within a (mixed) cell population, such as blood leukocytes, the total fluorescence intensity (integral fluorescence) is measured. The value of the integral fluorescence, is proportional to the brightness of a cell at a given fluorescence colour, and is therefore a direct measure of the number of fluorescent dye molecules per cell. These systems are multiplexed, as the cells can be labelled simultaneously with many different fluorescent dyes targeting different cell constituents. Cytometric systems are high throughput instruments that allow the collection of data of thousands of individual cells within seconds. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.