Talk:Macrophage colony-stimulating factor

Cytokine or chemokine?
According to my book ("Medizinische Mikrobiologie und Immunologie"; Hahn, Falke, Kaufmann, Ullmann; Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 5. Aufl., 2004; ISBN 3-540-21971-4) M-CSF is a chemokine, not a cytokine. Could someone more knowledgeable than me clarify on this one? 85.180.189.77 (talk) 06:59, 20 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I appologies in advance if I'm writting in the wrong place in an attempt to answer this. I'm new to commenting on wikipedia (but long term user) and unfamiliar with coding.
 * However, I'll try to answer your question, despite that almost two years have passed.
 * A good review of cytokines and chemokines can be found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12592293 Just to summarise:
 * Cytokines are a broad cathegory of small secreted proteins that can cause proliferation, differentiation activation or inactivation of cells within the immune system. Chemokines are a subgroup of cytokines, that are involved in motility of immune cells. Thus, they are involved in chemotaxis and subsequent adhesion of the immune cells. Using this classification, I would argue that CSF-1 / M-CSF is a cytokine and cannot be classified as a chemokine(and so does the NCBI description http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene?Db=gene&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=1435. Why your book says otherwise, I do not know. I do not know it, but it does sound decent. I hope this helped?212.88.77.66 (talk) 10:38, 19 February 2014 (UTC)