product categories
Enrichment Products
Media, Enzymes, & Supplements
Antibodies
Support Reagents Stingl et al. (Nature, 2006) utilized EasySep® and EpiCult®-B to isolate and characterize cell populations enriched for mammary progenitors and stem cells. Functional assays and gene expression analysis of the enriched fractions yielded new and exciting information about the differences between stem and progenitor cells.
background
The mammary epithelium has traditionally been considered as being composed of two lineages of cells, the luminal cells and the basal-positioned myoepithelial cells. However, evidence is now emerging that this tissue is much more complex than initially imagined and is composed of a hierarchy of cells that spans from mammary stem cells (MaSC) to progenitor cells to terminally differentiated cells.1-7 Recent reports have also demonstrated that mammary tumours are also arranged as a hierarchy and that cancer stem cells can be prospectively isolated.6,8 Key to the characterization of these different cell types has been the use of cell purification strategies such as fluorescence-activated cell sorting and/or immuno-magnetic enrichment to isolate phenotypically distinct subsets of mammary cells and the use of robust quantitative functional assays to determine the growth and differentiation properties of these cells at the clonal level. The gold standard assay for the detection of mammary stem cells is the ability to generate primary and secondary multilineage outgrowths in vivo. Mammary progenitor cells can be detected by their ability to generate phenotypically distinct epithelial colonies when plated at low density in liquid or semi-solid culture. Such an approach was recently described by Stingl et al. (Nature, 2006) in which EasySep® and EpiCult®-B was used to isolate and characterize cell populations enriched for mouse mammary stem and progenitor cells.
products for dissociation, enrichment, culture and assay
STEMCELL Technologies offers a variety of products for the dissociation of human and mouse mammary tissue, the enrichment of stem and progenitor cells, and the culture and characterization of human and mouse mammary epithelial cells. These products include:
· Collagenase and hyaluronidase enzyme mixture for the dissociation of human and mouse mammary tissue. · EasySep® immunomagnetic enrichment kits for the isolation of EpCAM+, MUC1+ and CD10+ human mammary epithelial cells and for the depletion of non-epithelial mouse mammary cells. · The ALDEFLUOR® kit can be used to identify primitive stem/progenitor cells within the normal human mammary epithelium can breast cancer stem cells in some tumour samples.6 · The EasySep® Mouse Mammary Stem Cell Enrichment Kit for the enrichment of mouse mammary stem cells. · Species-specific formulations of EpiCult®-B for the culture of human and mouse mammary epithelial cells. · MammoCult™ Medium (Human) for the culture of human mammary epithelial cells as mammospheres. · Antibodies specific for a variety of mammary cell lineage markers. 
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