Technical advance: immunophenotypical characterization of human neutrophil differentiation.

The current study reports a flow cytometry-based protocol for the prospective purification of human BM populations representing six successive stages of terminal neutrophil differentiation, including early promyelocytes and late promyelocytes, myelocytes, metamyelocytes, band cells, and PMN neutrophilic granulocytes. Validation experiments revealed a high purity of each bone marrow population and biological meaningful expression profiles for marker genes of neutrophil differentiation at a hitherto unprecedented resolution. Hence, the present protocol should be useful for studying neutrophil differentiation in vivo in the human setting and constitutes an important alternative to models that are based on in vitro differentiation of myeloid cell lines and HPCs.