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The widely held view that transfused bone marrow cells will not proliferate in normal mice, not exposed to irradiation or other forms of bone marrow ablation, was reinvestigated. Forty million bone marrow cells from male donors were given to female recipients on each of 5 consecutive days, 5 to 10 times the number customarily used in the past. When the recipients were examined 2-13 weeks after the last transfusion, donor cells were found to average 16-25% of total marrow cells. Similar percentages of donor cells were found when variants of the enzyme phosphoglycerate kinase determined electrophoretically were used for identification of donor and recipient cells. Evidence is presented that the proportion of donor cells is compatible with a linear dependence on the number of cells transfused over the range tested--i.e., 20-200 million bone marrow cells injected intravenously. Special proliferative sites thus do not appear to be required.
Brecher et al. (Sun,) studied this question.