The red blood cell (RBC), or erythrocyte, is a flexible biconcave disc 8 �m in diameter. Its main function is to carry oxygen from the lungs to the tissues of the body and to perform this it contains a pigment, hemoglobin. During its 120-d lifespan, it travels about 300 miles around the arteriovenous circulat ...
Spermatozoa were the first mammalian cells to be successfully cryopreserved (1), and the techniques developed by Sherman (2) enabled centers to begin to establish sperm banks for men at risk of losing their fertility as a result of clinical treatments for illness. Banks of cryopreserved donor ...
In 1972, Whittingham et al. (1) reported the first successful deepfreezing of mouse embryos. The method was efficient and reproducible, and it has been widely used since. This method includes a slow cooling process (this lasts a few hours after ice seeding). Recent attempts to improve the method have ...
The benefits of banking mammalian embryos for long-term storage have long been recognized (1). Cryopreservation of gametes prevents genetic drift, offering a viable alternative to maintaining active breeding colonies while safeguarding the genetic integrity of scientifica ...
Nature dictates that biological material will decay and die. The structure and function of organisms will change and be lost with time, as surely in laboratory cultures as in the biologists who study and manipulate them. Attempts to stop the biological clock have been conjured by minds ancient and ...
Although the first observations concerning low temperature preservation of spermatozoa date back to 1776 (when Spallanzani noted that spermatozoa, cooled in snow, became inactive but were revived on warming), successful cryopreservation protocols truly date from only the 1940s ...
Cryopreservation of fish spermatozoa has closely shadowed historical developments of the preservation technology used for mammalian gametes. Within 4 yr of the discovery of the cryoprotective value of glycerol (1), slices of Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) testis were succes ...
In contrast to the extensive research and advances in the cryopreservation of animal cell lines and tissues, few methodologies are available for the cryopreservation of invertebrate cells. Several research groups have reported methodologies for marine invertebrate gametes (1 ...
Storage of seeds is arguably the most effective and efficient method for the ex situ preservation of plant genetic resources. Low storage costs, combined with ease of seed distribution and regeneration of whole plants from genetically diverse material, offer distinct advantages for the ...
The ability to regenerate whole plants from cryopreserved, meristematic shoot tissues provides a useful method for conserving plant genetic resources. This technique is especially important for vegetatively propagated species, or, for plants that produce recalcitrant seed ...
Deposition at cryogenic temperatures is generally considered to be the safest method for long-term storage of living materials. (For a general introduction into the storage of plant cell cultures, refer to Chapter 11.
Plant cell and tissue culture is widely used in fundamental research (cell physiology, molecular biology and genetics, developmental biology, and so on) as well as in commercial activities (breeding and vegetative multiplication of food and feed crops and ornamentals). Several facto ...
Natural killer (NK) cells are important effector cells in the early control of infected, malignant, and “nonself” cells. Various receptor families are involved in enabling NK cells to detect and efficiently eliminate these target cells. The killer-cell immunoglobulin-like receptor ...
Matching for HLA at the allele level is crucial for stem cell transplantation. The golden standard approach for allele definition of full gene polymorphism, the so-called high-resolution HLA typing, is sequence-based typing (SBT). Although the majority of the polymorphism for class I is lo ...
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) are rare, multipotent cells characterized by their ability to self-renew and to generate all blood cells throughout life. Major advances have been made in the area of HSC research as a result of the development of different techniques that allowed HSC identific ...
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have drawn great interest in the field of regenerative medicine, for cell replacement, immunomodulatory, and gene therapies. It has been shown that these multipotent stromal cells can be isolated from tissues such as bone marrow, adipose tissue, trimester a ...
Within the last 25 years, flow cytometry and fluorescence-activated cell sorting have emerged as both routine diagnostic tools in clinical medicine and as advanced analytic tools critical in performing scientific research. This chapter aims at summarizing the use of flow cytometry in ...
Advances in noninvasive imaging technologies that allow for in vivo dynamic monitoring of cells and cellular function in living research subjects have revealed new insights into cell biology in the context of intact organs and their native environment. In the field of hematopoiesis and s ...
Complex biological samples hold significant information on the health status and development of disease. Approximately 22,000 human genes give rise to more than 400,000 proteins as functional entities (Anderson and Anderson, Electrophoresis 19:1853–1861, 1998). Thus, the prote ...
Molecular surveillance of hematopoietic chimerism is an important part of the routine diagnostic program in patients after allogeneic stem cell transplantation. Chimerism testing permits early prediction and documentation of successful engraftment and facilitates ea ...
