The study of neural potential in mesenchymal stem cells

Abstract

Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) is tissue-specific stem cells that can differentiat into bone cartilage, chrodocyte, adipocyte, and myoblast. Recently, there have been many reports that MSC have a capacity to differentiate into cells in other cell lineage, so called transdifferentiation, such as neural cells. Using either stem cell-based therapy or creating trophic factor is benefit for treatment of neural injury because the rebuilding neuron is an inefficient process in nature. Thus, understanding on this mechanism will lead to an improvement of MSCs future application, while fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) and retinoic acid (RA) are commonly used to induce neural differentiation of MSCs. Our results proposed that the mechanism neural gene regulation is associated with repressor element 1 (RE 1)-silencing transcription factor (REST) also called neuron-restrictive silencer factor (NRSF), REST/NRSF and NRSE dsRNA, found specifically in mouse MSCs which only found in neural tissue. NRSE dsRNA levels were up-regulated when mouse MSCs were treated with RA. In this study we found the basic understanding that will lead to improve the neural differentiation method of MSCs for future application.