Abstract
The differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) into neural cells in vitro provides a potential tool to be utilized for cell therapy of neurodegenerative disorders. Although previous studies repeated different protocols for the induction of neural cells from hMSCs in vitro, the results were not in complete agreement. In this study, we have attempted to compare three of these neural induction methods; retinoic acid (RA) treatment, RA treatment in serum reduced conditions, and treatment using other chemical compounds (dimethyl sulfoxide and potassium chloride) along with RA by real-time cell analysis and immunofluorescent staining of neural markers. RA treatment led to a slow progression of cells into neural-like morphology with the expression of neural protein neurofilament whereas reducing serum during RA treatment caused a much more extended differentiation process. Additionally, neural-like morphology was persistent in the later periods of differentiation in RA treatment. On the other hand, chemical induction caused cell shrinkages mimicking neural-like morphology in a short time and loss of this morphology along with increased cell death in later periods. Among the three methods compared, RA treatment was the most reliable one in terms of stability of differentiation and neural protein expressions.
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Acknowledgment
We thank Prof. Serdar Bedii Omay for supplying us bone marrow samples for hMSCs isolation. This work was supported by TUBITAK (106S279, SBAG-K-116) and Fatih University Research Project Foundation (P50030706).
Ethical issues
This work was developed under the Ethics Committee of KTU, process number 2007/26.
Authors’ contributions
All authors participated in planning the study and preparing the manuscript; SI designed the study, analyzed data and wrote the manuscript; BM and NK conducted the experiments.
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Editor: T. Okamoto
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Mammadov, B., Karakas, N. & Isik, S. Comparison of long-term retinoic acid-based neural induction methods of bone marrow human mesenchymal stem cells. In Vitro Cell.Dev.Biol.-Animal 47, 484–491 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11626-011-9425-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11626-011-9425-4