Isolating stromal vascular fraction from human adipose tissue

Hello all,

At the moment I’m trying to optimize my protocol for the isolation of stromal vascular fraction from human adipose tissue for flow cytometry measurements. According to my protocol I first wash the tissue with PBS, cut it into 1-2 mm pieces and digest with 1 mg/ml collagenase in krebs-ringer-bicarbonate buffer for 40 minutes at 37°C. After the digestion I filtrate the cells first through 100 µm and 40 µm (this step takes longer if I have more tissue), wash with ice cold krb buffer twice the initial volume and do two centrifugation steps. I have a few questions now:

  • is the collagenase reaction stopped by adding the ice-cold krb-buffer
  • how big is the effect of how long the tissues were in PBS before cutting (what is the maximum)
  • what could be the most important cause of variation (cutting, collagenase duration?) and how I could minimize the variation between the samples and treat them as equally as possible (which steps are important to be kept exactly the same, if I have more tissue and the time factor starts to play a role).

Thanks