Expansion and Chondrogenic Differentiation of Human Bone Marrow-Derived Mesenchymal Stromal Cells

Human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (BM-MSC) are adult multipotent progenitor cells that can be isolated from bone marrow. BM-MSCs have the ability to be expanded and differentiated into the chondrogenic lineage in vitro. Here we describe a standardized method to expand and chondrogenically differentiate human BM-MSCs, highlighting how to overcome technical challenges and indicating the most common readout parameters to evaluate the chondrogenic differentiation capacity.