Purification to apparent homogeneity and biochemical characterization of human pluripotent hematopoietic colony-stimulating factor.

Colony-stimulating factors (CSFs) are a family of hematopoietic growth factors required for the proliferation and differentiation of hematopoietic progenitor cells [I, 2]. In the human system, purification to homogeneity and biochemical characterization has only been reported for macrophage-active CSF (CSF-l) [3]. However, there are many reports about highly purified human granulocyte-macrophage CSFs (e.g. [4-7]), but not about pluripotent human CSF. Assays are available to detect human clonogenic precursors that give rise to cells of the erythroid, granulocytic, megakaryocytic, macrophage, colony-forming unit granulocytes, erythrocytes, macrophages, and megakaryocytes, CFU-GEMM, and possibly lymphoid lineages [8-10]. CSFs with activities on these pluripotential progenitor cells (pluripotent CSF) are produced by mitogenor antigen-activated T-lymphocytes [11] and by human tumorcell lines [12] or HTLV-transformed lymphoid cells [13]. We report in this paper the purification to homogeneity and biochemical charac-