Hi, I was wondering if anyone of you know whether Mast cells in mucosal tissue can express Thy1.2/CD90.2 (during activation or steady sate) in the mucosal tissue. I ask because we do see a weird population of CD117+CD90.2+FCeRI+ cells in the lungs of our mice.
Thanks
Hi Florian,
During development they do express but they seem to loose it when maturing. We tried to do adoptive transfer with in vitro cultured mast cell (both Ly5.1/5.2 as well as Thy1.1/1.2 system but never found them back. However, when you use mast cells from the bact-GFP-mouse you are able to track them by flow or histology, especially for latter you need to stain with anti-GFP antibody but it cant hurt to use that for flow also (intracellular staining). This is also when we discovered that the normal congenic markers are down-regulated during maturation in vivo of in vitro cultured mast cells.
As for your weird population, I am not sure what those are. I never saw them in skin, but yes the lung is a very different organ and I wish I had the opportunity in Singapore to work on it in the asthma model I was using. My wild guess is, if they are not mast cells, that these might actually be blasting blood derived monocytes or some sort of progenitor population. However, you could try to sort them, stain the granules with like berberine sulfate (fluorescent) or toluidin blue (light microscopy).
Hope this helps you and good luck with the research.
All best,
Victor
Dear Victor
Many Thx for your answer - you are right, we already thought about some precursors as well. Thank you for the staining tip! Will keep you posted on this if I get my head around this population.
Cheers
Florian
You are welcome, and yes, I am looking forward to your results...maybe the lung does have a rare population of mast cells not present in other locations. Mast cells are still an enigma, so it would be very exciting if you actually found a new distinct subset.
All the best,
Victor
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