I'm not sure to fully understand the question, but let's try to help... Dead bone whatsoever the cause (infection, vascular, ...) means no more cells alive to support any experimentation. Nevertheless and despite some ORTHOPAEDIC surgeon (as I am) advices, dead bone may be useful as an architectural matrix to help in bone reconstruction. In these cases (such as bone grafts) you may check osteoblasts activity FROM surrounding alive bone that progressively colonize the dead bone frame. So do not expect any result from dead dry bone...

Best regards

Thanks for the prompt reply Thierry W. Levi-Faict. You did answer my question. So now if someone has to use a bone to experiment in the lab, what would would you suggest? Should it be few hours old or a few days? Chicken bone? cow bone? or?

Not sure about animal bones, I'm not s specialist, but it's certainly quite close to it... So if you have to experiment something about osteoblasts, clasts or cytes direct from your specimen, the fresher the most efficient! As previously said, immediate removal and fast study (if U are working on alive specimens). Regarding their bone stock I would chose cows... If you are now looking for a proper matrix to test cell implantation you should use a dry 

Appreciated

I am not sure, what you mean by dead bone.

It depends on the experiment and the question you have.

"Dead bone" might still have some cells alive. Your could use the explants in culture to grow cellls. "Dead bone" might still have iductvie capacity. You could isolate growth factor, bmp...

You need to specify your question.

Not sure what exactly you mean by dead. We do ex vivo tissue culture experiments with human bone tissue collected from total hip replacement surgeries. As a standard we treat the bone within 24 hrs post surgery. Once I left the bone samples for 3 days in saline and then used for a experiment and was still able to get good quality RNA for RT-PCR. Also Cultured osteoblats out from the same bone without any problem. I think ostecytes  in bone samples will surprise you with how long they can survive ex vivo.  Happy to help if you have more question. Just inbox. Good luck. 

Thanks Asiri wijienayaka. Can we do same procedure (that you mentioned) with an animal bone (pig?)?