Loss of wnt/?-catenin signaling causes cell fate shift of preosteoblasts from osteoblasts to adipocytes.
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ABSTRACT: Wnt signaling is essential for osteogenesis and also functions as an adipogenic switch, but it is not known if interrupting wnt signaling via knockout of ?-catenin from osteoblasts would cause bone marrow adiposity. Here, we determined whether postnatal deletion of ?-catenin in preosteoblasts, through conditional cre expression driven by the osterix promoter, causes bone marrow adiposity. Postnatal disruption of ?-catenin in the preosteoblasts led to extensive bone marrow adiposity and low bone mass in adult mice. In cultured bone marrow-derived cells isolated from the knockout mice, adipogenic differentiation was dramatically increased, whereas osteogenic differentiation was significantly decreased. As myoblasts, in the absence of wnt/?-catenin signaling, can be reprogrammed into the adipocyte lineage, we sought to determine whether the increased adipogenesis we observed partly resulted from a cell-fate shift of preosteoblasts that had to express osterix (lineage-committed early osteoblasts), from the osteoblastic to the adipocyte lineage. Using lineage tracing both in vivo and in vitro we showed that the loss of ?-catenin from preosteoblasts caused a cell-fate shift of these cells from osteoblasts to adipocytes, a shift that may at least partly contribute to the bone marrow adiposity and low bone mass in the knockout mice. These novel findings indicate that wnt/?-catenin signaling exerts control over the fate of lineage-committed early osteoblasts, with respect to their differentiation into osteoblastic versus adipocytic populations in bone, and thus offers potential insight into the origin of bone marrow adiposity.
SUBMITTER: Song L
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3474875 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Nov
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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