Study of morphofunctional peculiarities of fibroblasts isolated from human vertebral growth plates during in vitro culturing.

We studied structural and functional peculiarities of growth zone chondroblasts isolated from human fetal spines on gestation week 12 and cultured in vitro over 4 passages. The morphology of chondroblasts of different differentiation degree was described. It was found that the population of chondroblasts had certain features determined by changes in the relative content of cells of different differentiation degree. The data suggest that culturing conditions affect cell differentiation and the possibility of using primary human chondroblast culture as the experimental model of differentiating human vertebral growth plate chondroblasts in vitro.