In Vivo Bioluminescent Imaging of Bone Marrow-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Mice.

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are multipotent adult stem cells present in multiple tissues, such as bone marrow, adipose tissue, umbilical cord, and amniotic fluid. MSCs can differentiate into multilineage cells under defined conditions in vitro and in vivo. MSCs have been shown to have therapeutic effects on various types of diseases. Noninvasive in vivo monitoring of MSCs is considered one of the important techniques for developing cell therapy. In this protocol, we introduce strategized MSCs derived from bone marrow (BM-MSCs) of knock-in mouse model expressing mCherry-Renilla luciferase (mCherry-RLuc) for noninvasive bioluminescence imaging (BLI) of injected BM-MSCs in vivo.