A) Experimental design for long-term transplantation.
B) At 3 months (90 days) post-transplantation, strong engraftment of αSMA-labeled progenitors in the marrow was observed. In addition, there were regions with donor osteoblasts lining the bone surface but relatively few osteocytes (top set of high magnification images), potentially indicating a newly formed group of osteoblasts. In addition, there are also regions of the cortex (bottom set of high-mag images) with strong osteocyte presence within the cortical bone matrix. n=6, female.
C) At 6 months (180 days) post-transplantation, engraftment of αSMA-labeled progenitors in the marrow was observed. In addition, there were regions with donor osteoblasts lining the bone surface but relatively few osteocytes (top set of high magnification images), potentially indicating a newly formed group of osteoblasts. There were also regions of cortical bone (bottom set of high-mag images) where most of the cortical width contains donor osteocytes, indicating strong engraftment in the matrix. n=3, female. Scale bars are 500μm in low-mag images, and 100μm in high-mag images.