The availability of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) or skeletal stem cells (SSCs) is vital to many of the tissue engineering strategies currently being developed for repairing bone and cartilage. One difficulty with using this cell population is that SSCs represent only a small fraction of the cells available from an individual patient’s bone marrow sample, typically less than 1 in 10,000. Therefore, methods have been devised to enrich the proportion of MSCs obtained from a bone marrow sample using hybridoma cell lines to generate antibodies to cell surface antigens specific for MSCs. Stro-1 is the most widely targeted of these cell surface antigens. The protocol described overleaf is used to isolate and enrich the Stro-1 positive fraction of cells from a bone marrow aspirate to provide a sample enriched for MSCs for use in both in vitro and in vivo studies.
