ABSTRACT
The presence of mesenchymal progenitor cells in the bone marrow can be traced back to the late 19th century by the work of Goujon (1869) and Biakow (1870) in heterotopic transplantation of rabbit marrow. The defi nitive evidence that bone marrow includes some non-hematopoietic plastic adherent precursor cells was originally provided by Friedenstein and his colleagues, who demonstrated the ability of a rare population of plastic adherent cells (approximately 1 in 10,000 nucleated cells in the bone marrow) to form spindle-like and round-shaped colonies when whole bone marrow
Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Lab, Beijing Institute of Transfusion Medicine, 27, Taiping Road, Beijing, China. aEmail: hcoohboy@163.com bEmail: yxlong2000@yahoo.com.cn cEmail: eliz994@yahoo.com.cn dEmail: xijiafei@gmail.com eEmail: peihy@hotmail.com fEmail: nirvanaseathunder@gmail.com gEmail: wenyue26@yahoo.com hEmail: peixt@nic.bmi.ac.cn *Corresponding authors
cells were grown in medium supplemented with 10 percent selected fetal bovine serum. Friedenstein defi ned these fi broblast precursors as fi broblast colony-forming units (CFU-F), analogous to hematopoietic colony-forming units (Friedenstein et al. 1970). As other groups subsequently extended these initial observations, it was accepted that the CFU-F progenitors are multipotent and able to differentiate into adipocytes, osteoblasts, and chondrocytes. Arnold Caplan fi rst used the term mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs, Caplan et al. 1991), based on the notion of a stromal stem cell proposed by Maureen Owen (Owen et al. 1987). So far, MSCs have been reported to isolate from several different connective tissues such as adipose tissue, muscle, placenta, umbilical cord matrix, blood, liver, and dental pulp, however, bone marrow is still one of the major sources for preclinical and clinical researches (Salem and Thiemermann 2010).
