Mast cells were first identified by Paul Ehrlich in 1878, when he was still a medical student.
Many fundamental aspects of mast cell ontogeny have been elucidated since Ehrlich's first
identification. Demonstration of mast cell derivation from bone marrow precursors could be
established in 1977 when Kitamura's group first showed reconstitution of mast cells in mast
cell-deficient mice by the adaptive transfer of wild type bone marrow and indicated that these
cells were of hematopoietic origin. It is now definitively established that development of mast …