Isolating Epithelial and Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition Populations from Primary Tumors by Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting

Abstract

Transgenic mice that express conditional reporters allow for the isolation of specific cell lineages. These cells can be further stratified by gene expression and collected by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) for further analysis. Using Cre-recombinase (Cre) technology we have generated a transgenic mouse line termed PKCY in which all pancreatic epithelial cells and therefore all pancreatic cancer cells are constitutively labeled with yellow fluorescent protein (YFP). We have used immunofluorescent staining for E-cadherin to divide the YFP+ tumor population into epithelial cells (E-cadherin positive) and cells that have undergone an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT; E-cadherin negative). This protocol describes how to prepare a tumor sample for FACS, with an emphasis on separating epithelial and EMT populations. These cells can then be used for a number of applications including, but not limited to, the generation of cell lines, gene-expression analysis by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) or RNA sequencing, DNA sequencing, chromatin immunoprecipitation, and western blots.