Does the TokuKit require 2mL of whole blood, or can we use less (and use the rest for other things)?

No, you don’t need to send all 2 mL of collected blood. The minimum volume we require is 0.5 mL of whole blood. That volume still allows us to detect all populations other than the most rare. In healthy donors, like those used in our CLIA validation report, the only populations we could not reliably detect in 2 mL of blood are transitional dendritic cells, mast cells, plasmablasts, and CD4 TEMRA cells. That said, analyzing 0.5 mL of blood would likely also exclude CD56hi NK cells, double-positive T cells, and plasmacytoid dendritic cells. Note that these populations could be detectable in non-healthy donors with altered immune composition of higher total immune cell counts per mL of blood.

Our kits are optimized for fixing 2 mL of blood, which can be aliquoted after fixation. If you want to fix less than the requested 2 mL of blood, please contact us to discuss custom solutions.

Read more about which populations we look at, their frequencies, and which cells would pass our event threshold at 2mL, 1mL, and 0.5 mL inputs of whole blood.

Read a detailed explanation