Isolation of Highly Pure Primary Mouse Alveolar Epithelial Type II Cells by Flow Cytometric Cell Sorting

In this protocol, we describe the method for isolating highly pure primary alveolar epithelial type II (ATII) cells from lungs of naïve mice. The method combines negative selection for a variety of lineage markers along with positive selection for EpCAM, a pan-epithelial cell marker. This method yields 2-3 × 106 ATII cells per mouse lung. The cell preps are highly pure and viable and can be used for genomic or proteomic analyses or cultured ex vivo to understand their roles in various biological processes.