Serum of lipopolysaccharide-treated mice contains two types of colony-stimulating factor, separable by affinity chromatography.

Serum from mice treated with bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was fractionated by Con A-Sepharose affinity chromatography, and assayed in vitro for colony-stimulating factor (CSF) using mouse bone marrow cells. The CSF failing to bind to concanavalin A-Sepharose (pool A) had similar biological properties to the unfractionated serum, i.e., it stimulated the formation of about equal numbers of granulocytic, mixed granulocyte-macrophage and macrophage colonies. The fraction eluted from the Con A-Sepharose column with alpha-methyl-D-glucopyranoside (pool B) had a steeper dose-response curve than either the unfractionated serum or the pool A CSF and most of the colonies were composed of macrophages. A mixture of the pool A and pool B CSFs stimulated colonies in a similar way as unfractionated serum and poolA. The apparent molecular weights of the two types of CSF were determined by two different gel-filtration procedures. Sephacryl S-200 gel-filtration suggested an apparent molecular weight of 85,000 for pool A CSF and 180,000 for pool B CSF. Gel-filtration on Sepharose CL-6B in the presence of guanidine hydrochloride (6M) yielded an apparent molecular weight of approximately 23,000 for pool A CSF and 33,000 for pool B CSF. The colony-forming cells (CFC) responding to pool B CSF were found to have a relatively high sedimentation velocity (peak sedimentation velocity 5.6--6.2 mm/hr) compared to the CFC responding to mouse-lung conditioned medium (MLCM) whose peak sedimentation velocity was between 4.0--4.5 mm/hour. The CFC responding to pool A CSF had an intermediate sedimentation velocity (peak 4.6--5.2 mm/hour). A time-course analysis of the morphology of clones or colonies in cultures stimulated with either MLCM or pool B CSF showed that the proportion of different colony types depends significantly on the incubation period and suggested that pool tb csf induced an early commitment of CFC towards macrophages differentiation.