Chromatin texture changes related to proliferation and maturation in erythrocytes

Erythroid cell types were quantitatively assessed on the basis of the analysis of their nuclear images after Feulgen and Heidenhain blue counterstaining. An original nonsupervised classification method, developed in our laboratory, was applied to cell cycle analysis. Results obtained suggest that, in the four proliferative generation cycles, which concur with the successive morphological stages, there is a sequential flow of cells from one morphological stage to the next by cell cycling. We show that the chromatin pattern alone made it possible to set up a metric of the whole differentiation process occurring in the normal human erythroblastic lineage in which proliferating events occur.