Description
Culture medium of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) is usually supplemented with either human platelet lysate (HPL) or fetal calf serum (FCS). Many studies have demonstrated that proliferation and cellular morphology is influenced by these additives hence they may favor outgrowth of specific subpopulations, thereby affecting the heterogeneous composition of MSCs. We have isolated and expanded human bone marrow derived MSCs in parallel with HPL or FCS for two passages. In HPL the proliferation was significantly higher and cells reflected more spindle-shaped morphology. Pairwise comparisons of gene expression profiles (Affymetrix HTA 2.0) revealed only moderate differences. When we apply a fold change >1.5 and limma-adjusted P-value of <0.05, only 69 transcripts were differentially expressed. These results indicate that there is no systematic bias for specific subpopulations of MSCs by using either HPL or FCS.