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© The Rockefeller University Press, 0021-9525/2000//971 $5.00
The Journal of Cell Biology, Volume 148, Number 5, , 2000 971-984

Original Article

Long-Term Culture of Purified Postnatal Oligodendrocyte Precursor Cells

: Evidence for an Intrinsic Maturation Program That Plays Out over Months



Dean G. Tanga, Yasuhito M. Tokumotoa, and Martin C. Raffa

a MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology and the Biology Department, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom
MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, The United Kingdom.44 171 380 780544 171 419 3538

d.tang{at}ucl.ac.uk

Oligodendrocytes myelinate axons in the vertebrate central nervous system (CNS). They develop from precursor cells (OPCs), some of which persist in the adult CNS. Adult OPCs differ in many of their properties from OPCs in the developing CNS. In this study we have purified OPCs from postnatal rat optic nerve and cultured them in serum-free medium containing platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), the main mitogen for OPCs, but in the absence of thyroid hormone in order to inhibit their differentiation into oligodendrocytes. We find that many of the cells continue to proliferate for more than a year and progressively acquire a number of the characteristics of OPCs isolated from adult optic nerve. These findings suggest that OPCs have an intrinsic maturation program that progressively changes the cell's phenotype over many months. When we culture the postnatal OPCs in the same conditions but with the addition of basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF), the cells acquire these mature characteristics much more slowly, suggesting that the combination of bFGF and PDGF, previously shown to inhibit OPC differentiation, also inhibits OPC maturation. The challenge now is to determine the molecular basis of such a protracted maturation program and how the program is restrained by bFGF.

Key Words: oligodendrocyte precursor cells • cell cycle • optic nerve • PDGF • bFGF

© 2000 The Rockefeller University Press

Abbreviations used in this paper: BrdU, bromodeoxyuridine; CNS, central nervous system; CNTF, ciliary neurotrophic factor; GAPDH, glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase; NRG, neuregulins; NT-3, neurotrophin 3; O-2A, oligodendrocyte type-2 astrocyte; OPCs, oligodendrocyte precursor cells; PDL, poly-D-lysine; Tc, cell cycle time; TH, thyroid hormone.


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