Flow cytometry in molecular medicine
The increasing prevalence of chronic diseases has greatly boosted the demand for flow cytometry technology in diagnosis and therapies of various diseases. There is a definite need for rapid, accurate, and sensitive diagnostic technology to precisely diagnose the disease at the gene level. Flow cytometry is a technology utilized to investigate a single-cell population from a heterogeneous population of cells, according to their different cell-surface molecules, size, and volume. The availability of specific monoclonal antibodies to their surface receptor molecules widely broadened the spectrum of clinical applications of this technique for the diagnosis and therapies of various hematological and genetic disorders. In addition, extensive development in bioinformatics and statistical analysis allows us to manipulate various parameters with several different combinations to offer a definite conclusion. Introduction of advanced methods, such as high-throughput multifunctional analysis, rapid detection, higher resolution, and improved cell sorting, enhances the efficiency in characterizing and identifying novel drugs for definite therapy.
The most common application performed on the flow cytometer is the immunophenotyping of cells types, present in blood or body fluid. It is the most important diagnostic tool in diagnosing of lymphomas and leukemia. It is also used to know the specific stem cell population in donor blood cells for bone marrow transplantation in leukemia patients. Flow cytometry is also useful in defining four distinct phases of the cell cycle, along with determining cell cycle replication states and cell aneuploidy associated with chromosomal abnormalities. Flow cytometry can be useful in distinguishing cell apoptosis and necrosis on the basis of differences in morphological, biochemical, and molecular changes occurring in the dying cells. The important signal transduction mechanism of the intracellular flux of calcium into the cell, which responds to the stimuli, can be monitored by flow cytometry.
