跟踪小鼠骨髓单核细胞<em>在体内</em

The bone marrow plays a central role in hematopoiesis and represents the main reservoir of monocytes that constitutively recirculate between the blood and the medullar parenchyma, renew the pool of circulating monocytes with a short life span ^2,3 and participate in the reconstitution of the steady state tissue-macrophages and dendritic cells ⁴. During inflammation or after transient aplasia, monocytes are actively mobilized from either the bone marrow or the spleen ^{5, 6, 7} and colonize inflamed organs. Several chemoattractant axis have been involved in the process of myeloid cell mobilization from the bone marrow ^{8, 5, 6,9}. Beyond the myeloid compartment the bone marrow is also an important site of T lymphocyte priming ¹⁰ and a niche of immunological memory ^11,12. Thus, this tissue is central for numerous investigations in the field of hematology and immunology. Our knowledge on the structural organization of medullar myeloid cells mainly arises from the analysis of histological section of fixed tissues ¹³. This static view does not allow for a study of the cellular exchange dynamic between the different compartments of the bone marrow, which is the basis of its functional activity.

Intravital imaging constitutes an important biological input in the study of cell mobility, cell adherence and cell-to-cell interactions, which were previously described only from in vitro systems. Technical challenges for proper intravital imaging include the ability to reach the tissue of interest in an optical point of view, and to maximize its isolation from physiological (breath, muscle or peristaltic contractions) or mechanical drifts (tissue disruption and extension following surgery, and exposure to microscope objective as well as temperature and vascular/oxygenation perturbations). Microscopic drifts may limit the ability to keep the focus a long time and could introduce artifacts in the quantification of cell motility. One alternative, validated for several tissues to reduce these technical difficulties, is to work on explanted tissue incubated in a thermostated and oxygenated medium; however, complete disruption of the lymphatic and vascular circulation may be problematic. Intravital imaging of skull bone marrow has several advantages concerning these issues. Firstly, it requires minimal surgical action. Secondly, thickness of the bone in this region allows direct visualization of bone marrow niches without abrasion, thus reducing physiological perturbations. The medullar network can be imaged in the parasagittal region of the bone; however the sinusoids are more visible in the fronto-parietal area where the bone matrix is thinner^12,14.

Intravital imaging relies on the availability of the most accurate fluorescent reporter tagging the population of interest. In vitro labelling of purified cell population before adoptive transfer led to important characterization of hematopoietic stem cell niches ¹⁵ or bone marrow endothelial microdomains favouring tumor engraftment ¹⁶, and provided several fundamental inputs on key concepts in immunology ¹⁷ . However, this approach usually requires hundreds of thousands of cells to get a chance to detect them afterwards in vivo. This could be explained by the high mortality rate following staining, the dilution in the whole body and the change in the activation state, which might lead to biased homing. Endogenous tagging from transgenic mouse system greatly overcomes these limitations and has allowed to image the behaviour of endogenous osteoblast ⁸, megakaryocytes ¹⁸ or myeloid-lineage subsets ⁶ . Nevertheless, one has to be cautious when considering the specificity of the fluorescent reporter among the studied subset.

The Csf1r-Gal4VP16/UAS-ECFP, called MacBlue mouse ¹, is a valuable transgenic system to study medullar monocytes with real time imaging ⁶. Intravenous injection of high molecular weight rhodamin-dextran distinguishes the medullar parenchyma from the vascular sinusoid network of the bone marrow. Using this approach, it is possible to track the monocyte behaviour in the different medullar compartments in a specific physiopathological context of interest. Furthermore, we propose an additional strategy to compare monocyte dynamics with that of neutrophils through in vivo labelling using a specific antibody.