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Optical Imaging for Stem Cell Differentiation to Neuronal Lineage

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Abstract

In regenerative medicine, the prospect of stem cell therapy holds great promise for the recovery of injured tissues and effective treatment of intractable diseases. Tracking stem cell fate provides critical information to understand and evaluate the success of stem cell therapy. The recent emergence of in vivo noninvasive molecular imaging has enabled assessment of the behavior of grafted stem cells in living subjects. In this review, we provide an overview of current optical imaging strategies based on cell- or tissue-specific reporter gene expression and of in vivo methods to monitor stem cell differentiation into neuronal lineages. These methods use optical reporters either regulated by neuron-specific promoters or containing neuron-specific microRNA binding sites. Both systems revealed dramatic changes in optical reporter imaging signals in cells differentiating into a neuronal lineage. The detection limit of weak promoters or reporter genes can be greatly enhanced by adopting a yeast GAL4 amplification system or an engineering-enhanced luciferase reporter gene. Furthermore, we propose an advanced imaging system to monitor neuronal differentiation during neurogenesis that uses in vivo multiplexed imaging techniques capable of detecting several targets simultaneously.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Nanobiotechnology Project (Regenomics, no. 20100002086), the Brain Research Center of the 21st Century Frontier Research Program (2009K001257), the WCU project of the MEST, the NRF (R31-2008-000-10103-0), and the National Research Foundation of Korea grant (2011-0019044) funded by the Korean government (MEST). This research was performed as a collaborative research project of project no. C11007 (Study for Building and Service Implementation of Future Cyber-Infrastructure Resources environment) and supported by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Nuclear Medicine, College of Medicine, Seoul National University, 28 Yongon-Dong, Jongno-Gu, Seoul, 110-744, Korea

    Do Won Hwang & Dong Soo Lee

  2. Institute of Radiation Medicine, Medical Research Center, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

    Do Won Hwang

  3. WCU, Department of Molecular Medicine and Biopharmaceutical Science, Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

    Dong Soo Lee

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  1. Do Won Hwang
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Correspondence to Dong Soo Lee.

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Hwang, D.W., Lee, D.S. Optical Imaging for Stem Cell Differentiation to Neuronal Lineage. Nucl Med Mol Imaging 46, 1–9 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13139-011-0122-8

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