Mesothelial cells can detach from the mesentery and differentiate into macrophage-like cells

Peritoneal cell suspension is composed of heterogeneous cell population. Macrophages are the most numerous cells among them. They can originate from different sources and can be resident, exudate and elicited. When we used Freund's adjuvant to elicit peritoneal macrophages, cells having large amount of caveolae on their plasma membrane appeared in the peritoneal wash. The number of these caveolae-rich cells increased by the time of the Freund's adjuvant treatment. Although their morphology was different form from the common macrophages, they were labelled with pan-macrophage antibodies. As the origin of these cells is unknown in this work, we tried to find out where they can originate from. Our interest turned towards the mesothelial cells. We found that the adjuvant treatment resulted in significant morphological changes in these cells and stimulate them to leave the surface of the mesentery. By the time of the adjuvant treatment, the macrophage markers expression increased in the mesothelial cells and more cells were found to detach from the mesentery. These results strongly suggest that under special stimuli mesothelial cells can leave the mesentery and differentiate into phagocytotic (macrophage-like) cells. These data raises the idea that mesothelial cells might not entirely differentiated and represent a multipotential cell lineage. To study whether this is the case we used anti-nestin antibody, which is a specific marker for multifunctional, multi-lineage progenitor cells. Mesothelial cells showed strong labelling with this antibody indicating that these cells really represent a 'young', not entirely differentiated cell population.