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Evaluation of a soybean lectin-based method for the enrichment of erythroblasts.

Babochkina T, Mergenthaler S, Lapaire O, Kiefer V, Yura H, Koike K, Holzgreve W, Hahn S

Laboratory for Prenatal Medicine, University Women's Hospital/Department of Research, Spitalstr. 21, CH 4031 Basel, Switzerland.

We performed a comparative study of the enrichment of erythroblasts by a soybean agglutinin galactose-specific lectin method and a standardized magnetic cell-sorting (MACS) protocol. Blood samples, obtained from 11 pregnant women at between 11 and 40 weeks of gestation, were split and examined by each method in parallel. The number of erythroblasts recovered by the lectin method was approximately eightfold higher than the number obtained by MACS. Our data suggest that the lectin-based method may provide a better approach for the enrichment of rare fetal erythroblasts from maternal blood.

Published 7 March 2005 in J Histochem Cytochem, 53(3): 329-30.
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