Abstract
Peripheral leukocytes from 10 patients with CML were cultivated in Petri dishes using RPMI 1640 supplemented with 20% fetal calf serum and their morphological observations were carried out for up to 1.5-2.5 months. Although the cell population per dish generally showed a gradual decrease, cells from all the ten patients began to show a marked maturation to mature basophils at about three weeks after culture initiation and in most cultures these basophils constituted more than 80% of floating cells when studied after five weeks of cultivation. It was unsuccessful to make analyzable metaphases from these basophils but presumably they are derived by maturation of CML cells in vitro.
A patient with CML who presented with a profound increase of basophils and eosinophils during her clinical course is illustrated to show that under certain circumstances CML cells mature preferentially along the basophilic series in vivo.
