Physical versus Immunological Purification of Mesenchymal Stem Cells

Abstract

A prerequisite before dealing with any cell type is to identify it and isolate it from the heterogeneous cell population that it belongs to. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) can be found in nearly all tissues and are mostly located in perivascular niches. MSC isolated from Bone marrow, adipose tissue, peripheral blood and different organs had shown promising potential for proliferation and differentiation into different cell types. They exhibit plastic-adherence under standard culture conditions, and this physi- cal method of isolation is widely used as it is the most economic method and yet reveals relatively purified populations of cells after 3 or 4 passages. The complete purification still needs a specific call to different MSCs subsets. This could be achieved by immu- nological sorting, which depends on identifying cell marker(s) of such cells. Selecting these cells using antibodies against their specific markers then sorting the cells either by Magnetic or florescence based techniques named Magnetic Activated Cell Sorting (MACS) or Florescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS) respectively is the principle of such purification techniques. The aim of this chapter is to thoroughly define MSCs and compare between the different available methods for their purification