Abstract
Our previous study definitely demonstrated that the mature astrocytes could undergo a de-differentiation process and further transform into pluripotential neural stem cells (NSCs), which might well arise from the effect of diffusible factors released from scratch-insulted astrocytes. However, these neurospheres passaged from one neurosphere-derived from de-differentiated astrocytes possessed a completely distinct characteristic in the differentiation behavior, namely heterogeneity of differentiation. The heterogeneity in cell differentiation has become a crucial but elusive issue. In this study, we show that purified astrocytes could de-differentiate into intermediate precursor cells (IPCs) with addition of scratch-insulted astrocyte-conditioned medium (ACM) to the culture, which can express NG2 and A2B5, the IPCs markers. Apart from the number of NG2+ and A2B5+ cells, the percentage of proliferative cells as labeled with BrdU progressively increased with prolonged culture period ranging from 1 to 10 days. Meanwhile, the protein level of A2B5 in cells also increased significantly. These results revealed that not all astrocytes could de-differentiate fully into NSCs directly when induced by ACM, rather they generated intermediate or more restricted precursor cells that might undergo progressive de-differentiation to generate NSCs.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 30973088, 30872829, and 30571998), Chinese PLA national scientific technological project (06G089), and the 11th Five-year Special-purpose Programme for PLA (08Z028).
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Hao Yang and Xin-Hong Qian contributed equally to this article.
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Yang, H., Qian, XH., Cong, R. et al. Evidence for Heterogeneity of Astrocyte De-Differentiation in vitro: Astrocytes Transform into Intermediate Precursor Cells Following Induction of ACM from Scratch-Insulted Astrocytes. Cell Mol Neurobiol 30, 483–491 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10571-009-9474-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10571-009-9474-3