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Stem Cell Background

Originally, the existence of stem cells was considered to be restricted to the developing embryo, where a handful of cells are known to divide and differentiate to form all the cells necessary to make an entire organism. More recently however, much effort has gone into research to show the persistence of "adult" stem cells in various organs and tissues. Adult stem cells are defined as undifferentiated cells located in specialized tissues that have the potential to self renew indefinitely and also have the ability to differentiate into more specialized cell types. The best-characterized adult stem cells are hematopoietic stem cells that reside in the bone marrow.

In a process refered to as hematopoiesis, they divide and differentiate to continually form the various types of blood cells. Bone marrow stem cells have been used to treat blood disorders with relative success.

Essential to the study of stem cells is the development of assays that allow the biology and behavior of these cells to be elucidated. 

For adult stem cells a large amount of research has gone into studying the appropriate growth and culture conditions required to maintain these unique cell populations.

In the study of hematopoiesis a number of in vitro assays have been developed to study and distinguish stem and progenitor cells at different stages of development and differentiation and include:

The long term bone marrow culture-initiating cell (LTC-IC) assay.  This assay takes advantage of the long lifespan and dependence on the bone marrow matrix to study the more primitive multi-potential progenitor cells.

The more differentiated and lineage committed progenitor cells can be grown in colony forming cell (CFC) assays which take advantage of the fact that these cells can divide and differentiate in a 'clonal manner' with the appropriate cytokine cocktails. Many stem cell progenitor types can be assessed using CFC assays, including erythroid (CFU-E, BFU-E), granulocyte-myeloid (CFU-GM), megakaryocyte (CFU-Mk), and lymphoid (CFU-pre B) cells. Work has also gone in to validation of these assays to correlate their output with clinical observations.

In vitro assays have also been developed to study non-hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. Of importance to the fields of bone marrow transplantation and tissue regeneration is the study of mesenchymal stem cells which form the bone marrow matrix. These cells can be quantified using the colony forming cell-fibroblast (CFU-F) assay or cultured and differentiated into adipogenic (fat) or osteogenic (bone) cells. Assays have also been developed to culture neural stem cells (neural colony forming cell, or NCFC, assay) and also differentiate neural precursor cells into astrocytes, neurons and oligodendrocytes. Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) can also be cultured to form endothelial colonies that have been correlated with cardiovascular disease.

At StemCell Technologies we work hard to stay at the forefront of this cutting edge research to offer our customers the highest quality products for stem cell biology research. Through our Contract Assay Services, we offer our expertise in these assays to help you answer your scientific questions.