Strain-specific variations in the development of dendritic cells in murine bone-marrow cultures

The dendritic cell (DC) is a professional antigen-presenting cell of central importance in immunity. In this paper, we examined DCs generated by 11-day culture of bone-marrow cells from the four mouse strains C57BL/6J, BALB/cA, C3H/HeN and B10.PL-H2u (73NS)/Sn with respect to cell yield as well as surface-marker phenotype and morphology. We also investigated the phenotypic changes and the T-cell stimulatory activity of the DCs induced by bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Morphologically, we observed low levels (5-10%) of granulocyte contamination of the cultures after a culture period of 11 days. Considerable strain-specific differences were found in the expression levels of the surface markers in addition to the differences in the ratio of the immature to mature DCs in the cultures that were not stimulated with LPS. Furthermore, we found that LPS strongly induces maturation of DCs in all strains investigated with the exception of the B10.PL strain.