Isolation and generation of human dendritic cells.

Dendritic cells are highly specialized antigen-presenting cells (APC), which may be isolated or generated from human blood mononuclear cells. Although mature blood dendritic cells normally represent ∼0.2% of human blood mononuclear cells, their frequency can be greatly increased using the cell enrichment methods described in this unit. More highly purified dendritic cell preparations can be obtained from these populations by sorting of fluorescence-labeled cells. Alternatively, dendritic cells can be generated from monocytes by culture with the appropriate cytokines, as described here. In addition, a negative selection approach is provided that may be employed to generate cell preparations that have been depleted of dendritic cells to be used for comparison in functional studies.