Identification of Predictive Gene Markers for Multipotent Stromal Cell Proliferation [RT-PCR]

ABSTRACT: Multipotent stromal cells (MSCs) are known for their distinctive ability to differentiate into different cell lineages such as adipocytes, chondrocytes and osteocytes. They can be isolated from numerous tissue sources including bone marrow, adipose tissue, skeletal muscle and others. Because of their differentiation potential and their secretion of growth factors, MSCs are believed to have an inherent quality of regeneration and immune suppression, which are considered advantageous in treating multiple disorders such as graft-versus-host disease. Since the number of MSCs derived from a tissue source is low, cellular expansion is necessary to obtain sufficient numbers for a desired cell therapy. However, after several rounds of passaging, our previous results have shown that MSCs exhibit reduced capacity for proliferation and differentiation. In this study, gene markers of MSC proliferation were identified and evaluated for their ability to predict the cell population proliferative quality. Microarray data of human bone marrow-derived MSCs were correlated with two proliferation assays. A collection of 24 genes were observed to significantly correlate with both proliferation assays (|r| > 0.70) for 8 MSC donors at multiple passages. These 24 identified genes were then confirmed using an additional set of MSCs from 8 new donors using RT-qPCR. The proliferative potential of the second set of MSCs was measured for each donor/passage by three proliferation assays for confluency fraction, fraction of EdU+ cells and population doubling time. The second set of MSCs exhibited a greater proliferative potential at passage 4 in comparison to passage 8, which was distinguishable by 15 genes; however, only 7 of the genes (BIRC5, CCNA2, CDC20, CDK1, PBK, PLK1, SPC25) demonstrated significant correlation (FDR: q < 0.05 and |r| > 0.62) with MSC proliferation regardless of passage. These 7 genes and the proliferative capacity of different non-MSC cell lines were assessed for comparison. Our analyses revealed that correlation between gene expression and proliferation was consistently reduced with the introduction of non-MSC cell lines; therefore this set of 7 genes may be more strongly associated with MSC proliferative quality. These correlative methods may be further used to identify additional markers that exhibit strong correlation with a particular MSC quality such as differentiation or immune suppression potential. Our results pave the way toward the identification of specific gene markers that could rapidly determine the quality of an MSC population for a particular cellular therapy in lieu of an extended in vitro or in vivo assay.

ORGANISM(S): Homo sapiens

PROVIDER: GSE74203 | GEO | 2016/07/01

SECONDARY ACCESSION(S): PRJNA299313

REPOSITORIES: GEO