Factors altering the ability of multipotential hemopoietic colony-forming cells to self-generate or form progenitor cells

Individual in vitro colonies grown from multipotential cells have been analysed for their content of colony-forming cells including BFU-E, Mix-CFC and non-erythroid CFC. The CFC content of mixed colonies was higher in colonies grown from spleen cells than in colonies grown from bone marrow cells and was unaffected by the addition of thymocytes or postendotoxin serum. When the incubation period was extended from 7 to 14 days, CFC content of mixed colonies increased. However, plate mapping and reculturing of individual mixed colonies demonstrated that different subsets of mixed colonies were present in day 7 and day 14 cultures. Although the number of mixed colonies developing decreased when stimulated by decreasing concentrations of pokeweed mitogen-stimulated spleen cell conditioned medium (SCM) the mean number of cells per colony remained unaltered and the content of CFC in such colonies increased. With the SCM concentration range tested, as the SCM concentration was decreased, the absolute number of mixed colonies containing CFC rose from 0.6 per culture to 2.4 per culture. Over this same SCM concentration range the mean number of CFC per mixed colony increased from 1.3 to 185.2. These data suggest that amplification within mixed colonies of the number of cells capable of colony formation may occur at the expense of the production of differentiating cells.