Lymphocyte subpopulations do not alter during blood storage at 4 degrees C

Recent articles have suggested that lymphocyte subpopulations, as determined by monoclonal antibodies, alter during overnight storage of whole blood at 4 degrees C. In contrast, we report here that the expression of lymphocyte subpopulation markers does not alter, but that aberrant results may be obtained due to a large amount of contaminating granulocytes in the lymphocyte preparation, thus indicating that the 'apparent loss' of lymphocyte markers is a technical rather than a biological problem.