RED-BLOOD-CELL SEPARATIONS BY GRAVITATIONAL FIELD-FLOW FRACTIONATION - INSTRUMENTATION AND APPLICATIONS

Field-flow fractionation (FFF), first described more than 20 years ago , is in constant development and, surprisingly, the simplest method, g ravitational field-flow fractionation (GFFF), appears to be very usefu l in cell separations -although this is still at an early stage of dev elopment. We describe here the design of a very simple biocompatible s eparator which can directly replace the chromatographic column in an H PLC system. The relative complexity of the elution of cellular materia l is shown for the case of human red blood cells (RBC) of different ch aracteristics and in this paper we show the versatility and selectivit y of FFF methods in micron-scale separations.