Immunophenotyping of the Medullary B Cell Compartment In Mouse Models

B cell development is a stepwise process encompassing several B cell precursor stages that can be phenotypically distinguished, and that is taking place in the bone marrow in adults. Interestingly, within the bone marrow B cell precursors coexist with the most differentiated actors of this lineage, the plasma cells. In this chapter, we describe a method to recover cells from the bone marrow and a flow cytometric approach to identify each subpopulation of the B cell lineage that resides within the bone marrow compartment. This protocol focuses on membrane markers to discriminate all the B cell subpopulations in order to preserve cell integrity during experimentation and for further analyses.