Fig 5. TAL1-short but not TAL1-long leads to hematopoietic stem cell exhaustion.

(A) Schematic illustration of the mixed bone marrow chimera experiments. Equal numbers of bone marrow cells from 5FU-treated CD45.1 wild-type mice were transduced with retroviruses expressing either TAL1-short-GFP or with TAL1-long-dtTomato. A mixture of 1:1 ratio of the transduced bone marrow cells was then transplanted into lethally irradiated CD45.2 wild-type recipient mice. Blood samples were taken at different time points to monitor the progression of the bone marrow cell reconstitution using flow cytometry analysis. All mice were killed 14 weeks after BMT, and the spleen and bone marrow were harvested and analyzed. (B) Representative dot plots of Thy1.2 vs. CD19 staining in untransduced (left), dtTomato+ (middle), or GFP+ (right) splenocytes from the recipient mice (C) Bar graph summarizing results shown in (B). (D) Representative flow cytometry histograms of CD11b staining gated on GFP−/dtTomato− (untransduced, left panel), dtTomato+ (Tal1-long, middle panel), or GFP+ (Tal1-short, right panel) splenocytes. (E) Bar graph summarizing results shown in (D). (F) Representative dot plots of Tal1-short GFP vs. Tal1-long dtTomato staining in the blood of the recipient mice at different time points over the course of 13 weeks. (G) Bar graph summarizing results in (F). Each mouse is presented with a different shade. In (C), two-tailed paired t test, *< 0.05, **< 0.01, sd. (n = 6). Underyling data can be found in S1 Data.