Fig. 4

Short-term and long-term proliferation of cMSCs. Passage 2 cMSCs were seeded at 100 cells/cm² in CCM on 12-well plates (n = 3 wells/cell preparation) with media exchange every other day. Mean cell number determined daily for 10 consecutive days using DNA quantification. a Mean short-term proliferation of a representative donor, demonstrating higher proliferation rates of adipose and synovium cMSCs. b Scatter plot demonstrating the number of cMSCs for all 15 cell preparations at days 5 and 10. Each data point represents the cell number for an individual cMSC preparation (bar = mean cell yield across the five donors). Long-term proliferation was determined over a five-passage, 25-day time course as described in the Methods section. c Population doubling (mean ± SD) of a representative donor, demonstrating increased doubling rate of adipose and synovium cMSCs, particularly at passages 1–3. d Population-doubling scatter plot for all 15 cMSC preparations at passages 1 and 5. Each data point represents the population-doubling rate for an individual cMSC preparation (bar = mean population doubling rate across the five donors). Note: b, d significant differences in cell number: ***p < 0.001, ****p < 0.0001. a, b, c denote significant differences between tissue sources (p < 0.05)