Optimized protocols for isolation, fixation, and flow cytometric characterization of leukocytes in ischemic hearts

Immune activation post-myocardial infarction is an orchestrated sequence of cellular responses to effect tissue repair and healing. However, excessive and dysregulated inflammation can result in left ventricular remodeling and pathological alterations in the structural and mechanical attributes of the heart. Identification of key pathways and critical cellular mediators of inflammation is thus essential to design immunomodulatory therapies for myocardial infarction and ischemic heart failure. Despite this, the experimental approaches to isolate mononuclear cells from the heart are diverse, and detailed protocols to enable maximum yield of live cells in the shortest time possible are not readily available. Here, we describe optimized protocols for the isolation, fixation, and flow cytometric characterization of cardiac CD45⁺ leukocytes. These protocols circumvent time-consuming coronary perfusion and density-mediated cell-separation steps, resulting in high cellular yields from cardiac digests devoid of contaminating intravascular cells. Moreover, in contrast to methanol and acetone, we show that cell fixation using 1% paraformaldehyde is most optimal as it does not affect antibody binding or cellular morphology, thereby providing a considerable advantage to study activation/infiltration-associated changes in cellular granularity and size. These are highly versatile methods that can easily be streamlined for studies requiring simultaneous isolation of immune cells from different tissues or deployment in studies containing a large cohort of samples with time-sensitive constraints.NEW & NOTEWORTHY In this article, we describe optimized protocols for the isolation, fixation, and flow cytometric analysis of immune cells from the ischemic/nonischemic hearts. These protocols are optimized to process several samples/tissues, simultaneously enabling maximal yield of immune cells in the shortest time possible. We show that the low-speed centrifugation can be used as an effective alternative to lengthy coronary perfusion to remove intravascular cells, and sieving through 40-μm filter can replace density-mediated mononuclear cell separation which usually results in 50-70% cell loss in the sedimented pellets. We also show that cell fixation using 1% paraformaldehyde is better than the organic solvents such as methanol and acetone for flow cytometric analysis.