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In vitro and in vivo assays for osteoclast apoptosis

Biological Procedures Online volume 7, pages 48–59 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

Mature osteoclasts, multinucleated giant cells responsible for bone resorption, are terminally differentiated cells with a short life span. Recently, we have demonstrated that osteoclast apoptosis is regulated by ERK activity and Bcl-2 family member Bim. In this paper, we summarize the methods we used to study osteoclast apoptosis in vitro and in vivo. Using adenovirus and retrovirus vectors, we were able to introduce foreign genes into osteoclasts and examine their effects on osteoclast survival in vitro. In addition, we established the modified methods for in situ hybridization and BrdU labeling of bone sections from mice to study osteoclast survival in vivo. The detailed methods described here could be useful for studying the biological process in bone.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, 113-0033, Tokyo, Japan

    Toru Akiyama, Tsuyoshi Miyazaki, Kozo Nakamura & Sakae Tanaka

  2. The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, 1G Royal Parade, 3050, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    Phillippe Bouillet & Andreas Strasser

Authors
  1. Toru Akiyama
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  2. Tsuyoshi Miyazaki
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  3. Phillippe Bouillet
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  4. Kozo Nakamura
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  5. Andreas Strasser
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  6. Sakae Tanaka
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sakae Tanaka.

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Akiyama, T., Miyazaki, T., Bouillet, P. et al. In vitro and in vivo assays for osteoclast apoptosis. Biol. Proced. Online 7, 48–59 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1251/bpo105

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1251/bpo105

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Biological Procedures Online

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