Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) have the properties involving high proliferation capability, widely distribution, functional tissue repair after injury, as well as immune modulation, by which bring us extensive therapeutic possibilities. There are plenty of methods for isolation of BMSCs, yet, BMSCs exhibit discrepancies in varied growth stage and culture conditions. Up to now, there has been no agreement about the identification methods for cultured BMSCs.
OBJECTIVE: To review the isolation methods and biological characteristics of BMSCs, and to compare the differential expression of BMSCs between in serum and serum-free medium, prior to and after proliferation, as well as before and after induction.
METHODS: A computer-based online search was performed using key words of “bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells, isolation, culture, induce, marker, and characterization” to find documents published in the database of CNKI (http://dlib.cnki.net/kns50/) or Pubmed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed) from January 2003 to June 2009. The languages were limited Chinese and English. A total of 237 literatures were searched by the computer. 
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The positive rates of CD44 and CD34 of BMSCs isolated by the whole bone marrow culture were smaller than that of the density gradient centrifugation. However, BMSCs isolated by the whole bone marrow culture were superior to those isolated by the density gradient centrifugation in cell viability, proliferation rate, confluence time, as well as generation time. Other methods for BMSCs isolation had drawbacks of large cost and high requirement of experimental equipments. Following conditions were used to identify BMSCs: cell adherence, cell surface molecule labeling, strong self-proliferation ability, as well as potentials multi-directional differentiation. BMSCs exhibit differential expression between in serum and serum-free medium, prior to and after proliferation, as well as before and after induction.