Since I have already responded to about a dozen requests of "What the ---- is an SP cell?" I thought I would just tell the group for those of you who do not know. SP stands for "side population" and is a way to define very primitive stem cells via efflux of the dye Hoechst 33342. The dye is excited with a UV laser and emission is collected in both a blue wavelength (i.e. 405 bp) and a red wavelength (i.e. 670 LP). These two emissions are ploted against each other to define what is know as the SP population that runs down from the G1 cells towards the origin on the dot plot. These cells have a much higher potential for long term repopulation than do CD34 or any equivalent cell. There are still a lot of unknowns about these cells and they are a hot topic in stem cell biology. Brian
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