Isolation of the stromal-vascular fraction of mouse bone marrow markedly enhances the yield of clonogenic stromal progenitors

The low incidence of CFU-F significantly complicates the isolation of homogeneous populations of mouse bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs), a common problem being contamination with hematopoietic cells. Taking advantage of burgeoning evidence demonstrating the perivascular location of stromal cell stem/progenitors, we hypothesized that a potential reason for the low yield of mouse BMSCs is the flushing of the marrow used to remove single-cell suspensions and the consequent destruction of the marrow vasculature, which may adversely affect recovery of BMSCs physically associated with the abluminal surface of blood vessels. Herein, we describe a simple methodology based on preparation and enzymatic disaggregation of intact marrow plugs, which yields distinct populations of both stromal and endothelial cells. The recovery of CFU-F obtained by pooling the product of each digestion (1631.8 + 199) reproducibly exceeds that obtained using the standard BM flushing technique (14.32 + 1.9) by at least 2 orders of magnitude (P < .001; N = 8) with an accompanying 113.95-fold enrichment of CFU-F frequency when plated at low oxygen (5%). Purified BMSC populations devoid of hematopoietic contamination are readily obtained by FACS at P0 and from freshly prepared single-cell suspensions. Furthermore, this population demonstrates robust multilineage differentiation using standard in vivo and in vitro bioassays.