What is Primary Cell Culture?
A technique where cells are isolated from the body tissues and grown in culture, trying to create in vivo conditions.
What are examples of non-haemopoeitic primary cultures?
What are examples of haemopoietic primary cultures?
What are the 6 features of primary cell cultures?
What happens in the disaggregation of cells?
What type of cell doesn’t need to be disaggregated in primary cell culture and why?
Haemopoietic cells because they are already disaggregated
What are the sources of stem cells?
What is the path from stem cells to blood cells?
Stem cells... Early progenitors... Late progenitors... Immature precursors... Red cells/neutrophils/platelets!
What do the stem cells that sit out of the cycle do?
either divide to produce identical clones of themselves or differentiate
At what point do stem cells become visually distinguishable?
immature precursors
What does CFU stand for?
Colony forming unit. (the letters at the end show which lineages they are limited to)
What are the constituents of bone marrow?
What are the defining features of stem cells?
What are the defining features of progenitor cells?
What are the defining features of precursor cells?
What do haematopoeitic growth factors do?
They are polypeptide growth factors, also known as cytokines.
They bind to the cell surface transmembrane receptor and stimulate growth and survival of progenitors.
About the structure of stromal cells…
they have an extracellular matrix and adhesion molecules on their surface. They provide cytokines.
Why do stem cells need to be processed?
stem cells are few in number and so we want to enrich and purify them
What are processing methods of stem cells?
Why are progenitors called CFUs?
Because they grow to form colonies of mature cells, containing up to 1000s of cells.
What do you need for a colony assay?
- growth factors
What happens in colony assays?
Larger progenitors are forced to mature and divide into colonies using growth factors when put into culture on a semi-solid medium. We can quantitate the number of CFUs we had originally and can use a microscope to identify the different CFUs.
What is LTBMC?
long-term bone marrow culture
What are the steps of LTBMC?