Center for Stem Cell Biology and Tissue Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510080, People's Republic of China.
J Cell Biochem. 2012 Feb;113(2):678-84. doi: 10.1002/jcb.23397.
Recently, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) have been derived from various techniques and show great potential for therapy of human diseases. Furthermore, the iPS technique can be used to provide cell models to explore pathological mechanisms of many human diseases in vitro, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), which is a severe recessive X-linked form of muscular dystrophy without effective treatment. In this study, we try to determine whether there are different characteristics of myocytes from mdx iPS cells and C57BL/10 iPS cells. Our results showed that both of mdx and C57BL/10 cells could be induced into iPS cells in vitro, whereas colony-forming ability of mdx iPS cells was much weaker than that of C57BL/10 iPS cells. Meanwhile, mdx iPS cells could be induced to differentiate into myocytes, whereas their differentiation efficiency was much lower than that of C57BL/10 iPS cells. And, the number of apoptotic cells in differentiated myocytes from mdx iPS cells was significantly higher than that from C57BL/10 iPS cells. More importantly, treatment of a pan-caspase inhibitor (Z-VAD) produced a significant decrease in apoptotic cells. This study might add some insight to the biology study of dystrophin gene.
最近，诱导多能干细胞（iPS 细胞）已通过各种技术得到衍生，并显示出治疗人类疾病的巨大潜力。此外，iPS 技术可用于提供细胞模型，在体外探索许多人类疾病的病理机制，如杜氏肌营养不良症（DMD），这是一种严重的隐性 X 连锁形式的肌肉营养不良症，目前尚无有效治疗方法。在这项研究中，我们试图确定 mdx iPS 细胞和 C57BL/10 iPS 细胞是否具有不同的肌细胞特征。我们的结果表明，mdx 和 C57BL/10 细胞都可以在体外被诱导为 iPS 细胞，而 mdx iPS 细胞的集落形成能力明显弱于 C57BL/10 iPS 细胞。同时，mdx iPS 细胞可以被诱导分化为肌细胞，但其分化效率明显低于 C57BL/10 iPS 细胞。此外，分化而来的 mdx iPS 细胞中的肌细胞中的凋亡细胞数量明显高于 C57BL/10 iPS 细胞。更重要的是，用一种广谱半胱天冬酶抑制剂（Z-VAD）处理可显著减少凋亡细胞。这项研究可能为肌营养不良基因的生物学研究提供一些新的见解。
