The reproductive potential of normal mouse embryo fibroblasts during culture in vitro

A direct estimate of the reproductive potential of mouse embryo fibroblasts through their entire lifespan has been made using the mini-clone technique, which permits the direct observation of the growth fraction in a bulk population by inspection of the growth behaviour of individual cells. We have measured the colony size on each island that contained one or two cells at the beginning and the fraction of islands which, starting from one or two cells failed to divide even once. We observed that even in a young culture there are individual cells that can only reproduce two or three times. With each succeeding passage the distribution of colony sizes shifts to a greater proportion of small colonies. The median colony size decreases with each passage. Furthermore, the fraction of non-dividers directly observed increases smoothly with time; the fraction of non-dividers is quite small at the first passage but increases steadily to reach 0.6 at the last passage, after about 30 generations. These smooth changes in the growth behaviour of this cell strain are accurately described by the mortalization theory of Shall and Stein, in which the single parameter gamma, describes the change in reproductive potential over the entire lifespan. The parameter gamma describes the rate at which the doubling time of the culture increases; it is the number of generations at which half of the newborn cells are themselves reproductively sterile. Our present data provide an estimate of gamma for this cell strain equal to 21.2 generations, which compares well with a previous estimate of 20.3 generations.