Transplanted bone marrow derived cells (BMDCs) have been reported to fuse with cells of diverse tissues [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] , but the extremely low frequency of fusion has led to the view that such events are biologically insignificant. Nonetheless, in mice with a lethal recessive liver disease (tyrosinaemia), transplantation of wild type BMDCs restored liver function by cell fusion and rescued the mice from death 3, 9 , indicating that cell fusion can have beneficial effects. Here we report that chronic inflammation resulting from severe dermatitis or autoimmune encephalitis leads to robust fusion of BMDCs with Purkinje neurons and formation of hundreds of binucleate heterokaryons, a 10-100 fold higher frequency than previously reported 8,10,11,14 . Single haematopoietic stem cell transplants showed that the fusogenic cell is in the haematopoietic lineage and parabiosis experiments revealed that fusion can occur without irradiation. Species-mismatched bone marrow transplants resulted in activation of dormant rat Purkinje neuron-specific genes in BMDC nuclei post-fusion with mouse Purkinje neurons consistent with nuclear reprogramming. The precise neurological role of these heterokaryons awaits elucidation, but their frequency in brain after inflammation is clearly much higher than previously appreciated.Although fusion of like cells has long been known to accompany the normal development of a number of tissues such as skeletal muscle, bone and the placenta 15-17 , recent evidence from numerous laboratories indicates that bone marrow derived cells (BMDC) can fuse with

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are capable of extensive self-renewal in vivo and are successfully employed clinically to treat hematopoietic malignancies, yet are in limited supply as in culture this self-renewal capacity is lost. Using an approach at the interface of stem cell biology and bioengineering, here we describe a novel platform of hydrogel microwell arrays for assessing the effects of either secreted or tethered proteins characteristic of the in vivo microenvironment, or niche, on HSC fate in vitro. Time-lapse microscopic analyses of single cells were crucial to overcoming inevitable heterogeneity of FACS-enriched HSCs. A reduction in proliferation kinetics or an increase in asynchronous division of single HSCs in microwells in response to specific proteins (Wnt3a and N-Cadherin) correlated well with subsequent serial long-term blood reconstitution in mice in vivo. Single cells that divided once in the presence of a given protein were capable of in vivo reconstitution, providing evidence of self-renewal divisions of HSCs in vitro. These results validate the hydrogel microwell platform as a broadly applicable paradigm for dissecting the regulatory role of specific signals within a complex stem cell niche.