Maintenance of hemopoiesis in long-term bone marrow cultures from S1/S1d and W/Wv mice.

Although phenotypically similar, the cellular defects in congenitally anemic mice of genotype W/Wv and S1/S1d are quite different. W/Wv mice have defective hemopoietic stem cells; in contrast, S1/S1d mice have normal stem cells, but their hemopoietic microenvironment cannot support normal differentiation of the stem cells. We also observed defective hemopoiesis as measured by granulocyte-macrophage colony-forming units (GM-CFU) in long-term bone marrow cultures (LTBMC) established with marrow from these mutants, but in contrast to an earlier report we obtained long-term maintenance of hemopoiesis (up to 20 weeks) albeit at a lower level than the control (28% of control for S1/S1d and 23% for W/Wv). These levels probably reflect more accurately the in vivo effects of the mutations than the severe defect reported previously. However, this level of hemopoiesis and the high variability observed in replicate flasks in LTBMC make it difficult to study these mutants in tissue culture.