Isolation of melanoma cell subpopulations using negative selection.

Melanomas are phenotypically and functionally heterogeneous tumors comprising of distinct subpopulations that drive disease progression and are responsible for resistance to therapy. Identification and characterization of such subpopulations are highly important to develop novel targeted therapies. However, this can be a challenging task as there is a lack of clearly defined markers to distinguish the melanoma subpopulations from a general tumor cell population. Also, there is a lack of optimal isolation methods and functional assays that can fully recapitulate their phenotype. Here we describe a method for isolating tumor cells from fresh human tumor tissue specimens using an antibody coupled magnetic bead sorting technique that is well established in our laboratory. Thus, melanoma cells are enriched by negative cell sorting and elimination of non-tumor cell population such as erythrocytes, leukocytes, and endothelial cells. Enriched unmodified tumor cells can be further used for phenotypic and functional characterization of melanoma subpopulations.