In order to derive bone marrow macrophages, we culture the bone marrow cells with some cytokines which influence the characteristics of these macrophages (depending on culture conditions, you will get different kinds of macrophages).

On the other hand, naive peritoneal macrophage are infrequent but may represent a more physiological state. However, use of inducing agents, such as thioglycollate, change this. In my hand, bone marrow-derived macrophages were more phagocytic than thioglycollate-induced peritoneal macrophages.

The following publication may be useful:

Characterization of murine macrophages from bone marrow, spleen and peritoneum.

Wang et al. BMC Immunol. 2013

PMID: 23384230

I believe the answer to your question regarding when to use one or the other depends on the question that you are trying to answer.  One thing is certain though, not all macrophages can be assumed to be the same.

Use PM for quick experiments - on ice, reagents added, readout.

BM-derived ones you would use for longer term experiments where you want to differentiate them this way or that.

Good luck!

Please have a look at this paper : Shuyi Zhang et al. Plos Negl. Trop. Dis. 2010, 4, e648. You will see that the concept of M1 / M2 macrophages has some problems when comparing bone marrow derived MØ and peritoneal MØ (even if unfortunately they have been elicited). A most important paper.  Monononuclear phagocytes are different depending upon the compartment they derived from. Intestine MØ don't respond to activators; alveolar MØ cannot be rendered LPS tolerant. Kupffer cells don't display similar gene signature, etc, etc...

So what you observed with one type of MØ, may not be similar with another one

Hey Abdullah, BMDM or peritoneal macrophages are used frequently in our lab. Depending on how much cells you need for your experiments, you can choose between these two cell types.

You get a lot of BMDM from one mouse, so for the basic and establishing (thesis proofing) experiments they work quite fine. But, despite the fact that they are primary macrophages, they react not as quick and with the same strength then ex vivo macrophages (for example alveolar macrophages, peritoneal macrophages, Kupffer cells). Peritoneal macrophages are used mainly in our lab as an ex vivo macrophages model, but we never inject mice with thioglycolate to increase cell numbers. We compared thioglycolate-elicted and normal peritoneal macrophages and the thioglycolate-elicted cells reacted worse in nearly every parameter we tested (phagocytosis, ROS production, cytokine secretion, bacterial degradation). So when you decide to use peritoneal macrophages, I would not reccomend thioglycolate (I know everybody is doing it, but we made very bad experiences with it). We puplished a little paper recently that describes transfection of pirmary macrophages but also describes very detailed the preparation of BMDM and PM. If you like, please have a look at: Highly Efficient Transfection of Primary Macrophages with In Vitro Transcribed mRNA, November 2019, Journal of Visualized Experiments, DOI: 10.3791/60143 Please feel free to ask any further questions. All the best and a nice week. Marc

In context of this discussion, I want to point to our recent paper, in which we investigated a new variant of non-canonical autophagy in macrophages infected with Listeria monocytogenes. Importantly, this paper also shows that not every macrophage type is suitable for every study and experimental analysis. We show that BMDM have much less of the ROS-generating enzyme Nox2 and therefore produce neearly no extracellular/phagosomal ROS. Only after pro-inflammatory priming, Nox2 protein levels and ROS production nearly reach levels of ex vivo peritoneal macrophages.

If you like, please have a look at:

Article Macrophages target Listeria monocytogenes by two discrete no...

All the best and stay healthy,

Marc