Hemopoietic stem cells: their roles in human leukemia and certain continuous cell lines.

Hemopoietic stem cells may give rise to progeny like themselves or undergo determination; this event is followed by a series of maturation divisions ending in proliferatively inert but functional cells. In normal hemopoiesis and acute leukemia stem cell renewal is not exact; proliferative capacity is lost gradually. As a consequence, clonal populations cannot be continued indefinitely. Postdeterministic differentiation normally leads to cellular diversity; following transformation this diversity is increased, with the production of blast cells together with one or more myelopoietic lineage. The blasts are heterogeneous both in their proliferative capacity and their phenotypes, as determined using immunologically defined markers. Both self-renewal and determination are considered to be irreversible in vivo. By contrast, in continuous myelopoietic cell lines self-renewal is sufficiently precise to confer immortality on the populations. Furthermore, both determination and renewal may in some instances be reversible. The differences between normal or leukemic hemopoiesis in vivo and continuous lines in culture limits the value of the latter for studies of normal blood formation or the clonal hemopathies.