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Evaluation of transdifferentiation from mesenchymal stem cells to neuron-like cells using microfluidic patterned co-culture system

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Abstract

We design a microfluidic patterned co-culture system for mouse mesenchymal stem cells (mMSCs) and neural cells to demonstrate the paracrine effects produced by the neural cells in facilitating the transdifferentiation from mMSCs to neuron-like cells. Neural cells and mMSC are orderly patterned in the microfluidic co-culturing system without direct cell contact. This configuration provides us to calculate the percentage of neural marker transdifferentiated by mMSCs easily. We obtain higher transdifferentiated ratio of mMSC in the microfluidic co-culturing system (beta III tubulin: 67%; glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP): 86.2%) as compared with the traditional transwell co-culturing system (beta III tubulin: 59.8%; GFAP: 52.0%), which is similar to the spontaneous neural marker expression in the undifferentiated MSCs (beta III tubulin: 47.5%; GFAP: 60.1%). Furthermore, mMSCs expressing green fluorescent protein and neural cells expressing red fluorescent protein were also used in our co-culture system to demonstrate the rarely occurring or observed cell fusion phenomenon. The results show that the co-cultured neural cells increased the transdifferentiation efficiency of mMSCs from soluble factors secreted by neural cells.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledged the financial support by National Science Council of Taiwan for this research (NSC98-2221-E-002-045-MY3). This research was also partially financial supported by NTUH Grants VN97-100, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, No.1, Sec.1, Jen-Ai Road, 100, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China

    De-Yao Wang & Yi-You Huang

  2. Department of Animal Science and Technology, College of Bio-Resources and Agriculture, National Taiwan University, No.1, Sec.4, Roosevelt Road, 10617, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Shinn-Chih Wu & Shih-Hsiang Hsiao

  3. Institute of Biotechnology, College of Bio-Resources and Agriculture, National Taiwan University, No.1, Sec.4, Roosevelt Road, 10617, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Shau-Ping Lin

  4. Department of Chemical and Material Engineering, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Dou-Liu, Yun-Lin, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Tze-Wen Chung

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  1. De-Yao Wang
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  2. Shinn-Chih Wu
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  3. Shau-Ping Lin
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  4. Shih-Hsiang Hsiao
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Correspondence to Yi-You Huang.

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De-Yao Wang and Shinn-Chih Wu are equally contributed.

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Wang, DY., Wu, SC., Lin, SP. et al. Evaluation of transdifferentiation from mesenchymal stem cells to neuron-like cells using microfluidic patterned co-culture system. Biomed Microdevices 13, 517–526 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10544-011-9520-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10544-011-9520-z

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