Fluorescence activated cell-sorting of haemocytes in Penaeid prawns

Prawn haemocytes can usually be divided into three subtypes by their cell sizes and the degree of granularity. The hyaline cells are generally smaller, while the semi-granulocytes and the granulocytes have increasing amount of granules inside their cells. Both relative cell sizes and granularity can conveniently be measured by the forward scatter (FSC) and side scatter (SSC), respectively, in most cytometers. In this paper, we demonstrated the use of these two parameters to distinguish Penaeid haemocytes into distinct subpopulations. The hyaline cells had the smallest values of FSC, while the semi-granulocytes and granulocytes had increasing values of SSC. This pattern is significantly different from a previous report on flow cytometric analysis of Penaeus japonicus. We were also able to use the same parameters to sort the morphologically distinct haemocyte types from P. penicillatus, A monodon and P. japonicus. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved