In vitro studies on lymphocyte differentiation. I. Long term in vitro culture of cells giving rise to functional lymphocytes in irradiated mice.

In vitro cultures of mouse bone marrow cells, maintained for periods up to 7 wk, were shown to contain cells able to repopulate irradiated hosts with T and B lymphocytes. The lymphocytes were fully functional and there did not appear to be any gross restriction of their receptor repertoire. The cultured cells reconstituted irradiated semiallogenic hosts without evidence of graft-versus-host disease, suggesting that culture of donor marrow might be a useful preliminary to transplantation when tissue matching is incomplete.