Man, sometimes y'all send me papers and totally ruin what was otherwise a really focused run or something. This paper is certainly the case, because it is a fix for something I had no idea was an issue.
We've had ICP-MS of single cells for at least a decade. Maybe much longer? I don't know. There is even a commercial FACs coupled ICP-MS thing that I'd love to have. So when this paper popped up in my inbox with the suggestion that it is a big deal I thought I was just being sabotaged.
Did you know that when we do ICP-MS of mammalian cells they're fixed in formaldehyde or something first? It's true, I checked method sections of a couple papers like this one.
This may not always be a bad thing, particularly for cell surface markers you're tagging with an antibody with a metal chelated to it. However, if I wanted to measure how much of a metal containing drug was in my cells, I think I'd be nervous about the effects dumpinng formaldehyde on them would cause versus the original conditions. Even better, while this is sort of in-house developed, it was done using commercially available tools and the instructions are clear enough that it makes me feel confident that you could put it together.
They used a really nice tool I've never actually seen in person - an ICP (Inductively Coupled Plasma, in this case, not the HPLC thing) triple quadrupole (Agilent 8900, I think). I don't see why the second and third quads were necessary. This matters because the last ICP single quad I bought more or less in the HPLC price range. I looked for a quote but couldn't come up with it. I did find an ICP-QQQ quote and that was around what you'd expect for a good LC-QQQ, somewhere in the $300k range and I couldn't come up with a great reason for why I'd want the other 2 quads so no one would pay more than 2x for them for me.
That's a lot of words for - this appears to be something that could be assembled relatively easily at a not entirely insane pricepoint.
No comments:
Post a Comment