CE analysis of the acidic organelles of a single cell.

The properties of organelles within a cell have been shown to be highly heterogeneous. Until now, it has been unclear just how much of this heterogeneity is endemic to the organelle subpopulations themselves and how much is actually due to stochastic cellular noise. An attractive approach for investigating the origins of heterogeneity among the organelles of a single cell is CE with LIF detection (CE-LIF). As a proof of principle, in this report we optimize and use a single cell CE-LIF method to investigate the properties of endocytic (acidic) organelles. Our results show that the properties of individual acidic organelles containing Alexa Fluor 488 Dextran suggest that there are two groups of CCRF-CEM cells: a group with a high dextran content per cell, and a group with a low dextran content per cell. Furthermore, the individual organelle measurements of the single cells allow us to compare in each group the distributions of doxorubicin content per acidic organelle and electrophoretic mobilities of these organelles.