DISCUSSION

BMMs are an excellent model to study various mechanisms in a primary cell culture. Compared to many other primary cells, the BMMs are homogenous, have a proliferative capacity, are transfectable, and have a lifespan longer than a week. In fact, BMMs can be grown up to three weeks without noticeable cell death or altered morphology. BMMs can be used as a primary cell culture system to study gene function in vitro (eg, ablating gene expression in transgenic mice). Altered proliferation, function, and gene expression can all be analyzed using BMMs (Weischenfeldt et al. 2008). Additionally, macrophages are specialized cells that carry out numerous tasks in the immune system such as phagocytosis, antigen presentation, cytokine production, and migration. The BMMs represent a tractable system to assay these functions in cell culture (Kanters et al. 2003; Doyle et al. 2004; Cho et al. 2007).