MethoCult Optimum w/o EPO, 100mL

A methylcellulose-based medium from STEMCELL Technologies engineered for colony-forming unit (CFU) assays used to enumerate and characterize human hematopoietic progenitor cells. The Optimum formulation is engineered to deliver clearer colony morphology and more consistent readouts than earlier formulations, supporting cleaner identification of erythroid burst-forming units (BFU-E), granulocyte-macrophage (CFU-GM), and multi-lineage CFU-GEMM colonies under inverted microscopy.

Supplied as a 100 mL bottle without erythropoietin (w/o EPO), so investigators add their own cytokine combination tailored to the species and question at hand: human IL-3, SCF, G-CSF, GM-CSF, and EPO for cord blood CD34+ enrichment studies, or murine cytokines for bone marrow plating. A typical plating recipe mixes 2.5 mL of medium with 0.25 mL of cell suspension per 35 mm dish, yielding roughly 2 mL final working volume per well at the assay viscosity.

Store frozen at -20 °C, protect from light, and avoid repeated freeze-thaw cycles; thaw the bottle in a refrigerator or cold water bath just before plating. After plating, dishes incubate at 37 °C with 5% CO₂ for 14 days before scoring. The w/o EPO format is useful when probing EPO-responsiveness of specific progenitors or when comparing defined cytokine mixes side by side, making the kit a flexible foundation for research-use-only hematopoiesis experiments.