Speaker
Description
Macrophages, as professional phagocytic cells, remove apoptotic cells during inflammation but also in routine tissue homeostasis. Additional to their defining phagocytic function, macrophages within different tissues exhibit unique properties. The mechanisms which control this phenotypic and functional heterogeneity among macrophages are currently under investigation. We studied the phagocytic activity of in vitro derived macrophages from spleen and bone marrow progenitors and of macrophages derived from Hoxb8 immortalized progenitors. The quantities of actively phagocytosing cells at different time points during their differentiation process were compared by microscopic means. Furthermore, the expression of general macrophage marker genes and genes specifically transcribed in phagocytosis were analyzed. We observed that the origin of the macrophages and the differentiation stage affected the gene expression and the phagocytic activity. These results of this ongoing experiment emphasize the heterogeneity among macrophages and indicate the direction for subsequent studies to further investigate the unique properties of different macrophage populations.
