Primitive hemopoietic stem cells: direct assay of most productive populations by competitive repopulation with simple binomial, correlation and covariance calculations.

Quantitative analyses of primitive hemopoietic stem cell (PHSC) populations are important both for basic biology and for clinical applications. Unfortunately, many conventional assays fail to measure long-term repopulating ability and maximal differentiating ability, the most important characteristics of the PHSC. The competitive repopulation assay described here focuses on this characteristic, assaying the precursors from which most differentiated cells are descended over large fractions of the life span in laboratory mice. Thus long-term repopulating ability and the ability to differentiate into both myeloid and lymphoid lineages are measured directly from 2.5 to 12.5 months after transplantation. This technique also has found high correlations between granulocytes, macrophages, and T and B lymphocytes as early as 3 weeks after transplantation. All or most differentiated cells of these widely disparate types appear to be descended from a common precursor cell, while myeloid-specific or lymphoid-specific precursors produce few or no descendants. However, large increases in variances between 3 and 6 weeks and 12 weeks after transplantation suggest that most of the initially active multilineage precursors are exhausted. Thus the ability to differentiate into widely disparate lineages does not establish long-term repopulating ability.