Competitive Transplants to Evaluate Hematopoietic Stem Cell Fitness

The overall goal of this experiment is to determine the fitness of bone marrow hematopoietic stem cells in vivo using a competitive transplant assay. So this method can help answer key questions in the field of stem cell biology and hematopoietic cell transplantation about the impact of various manipulations on stem cell self-renewal after transplant. The main advantages of this technique are that it requires a limited number of animals and that it does not involve cell sorting.

Though this method can provide insight into stem cell function, it can be also useful in other fields such as immunology, through the use of mixed bone marrow chimeras. The initial development of this technique in the 1960s paved the way for researchers in the field of stem cell biology to explore the identity and function of hematopoietic stem cells in humans and mice. Demonstrating the procedure will be Roxanne Hetu-Arbour, a Master's student in the lab, and Edward Owusu Kwarteng, a PhD student.