While purity is important for clarity of results, having a highly pure cell separation is meaningless if you cannot isolate enough cells to accommodate your downstream analysis goals. For these reasons, it is important to also consider yield when choosing a separation technique. Yield is used to describe how many cells of interest were successfully isolated following cell separation. Higher yields provide more cells for your desired applications.
Another way to think about the number of cells isolated during a given cell separation is by calculating recovery. While yield looks at the absolute number of cells isolated, recovery takes into account how many cells of interest were in the starting material and reveals the percentage of those cells that were successfully captured during your separation. This gives researchers an indication of how effective their separation technique is and how many target cells are missed during their selection. Therefore, recovery can be a critical parameter to consider when selecting or optimizing a cell separation method.
Yield and recovery are intimately connected and can be impacted by numerous factors. For best results, it is critical to start with a fresh sample and use a cell isolation kit of superior quality.