Using Plant Virus Based Nanorods to Modulate the Differentiation of Human Bone Marrow Stem Cells.

Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) is a protypical nanorod-shaped bioparticles that has been used as a building block to construct a variety of self-assembled nanomaterials for different biomedical applications, including drug delivery, imaging, tumor immunotherapy and tissue engineering. In this work, the roles of TMV and its mutant TMV-RGD1 nanoparticles on the differentiation of human bone marrow stem cells (hBMSCs), an important process in bone regeneration, were carefully investigated. We observed that cells cultured on the TMV-RGD1 nanorods coated substrate showed significantly higher levels of gene and protein expression of osteo-specific markers osteocalcin (OCN) and bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2). Investigation of alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity and calcium deposition further confirmed that the TMV-RGD1 substrate could promote the osteogenesis and induce the mineralization of hBMSCs. On the other hand, the adipogenesis was downregulated on TMV and TMV-RGD1 coated substrates. Taken together, this study demonstrates for the first time the potential of TMV-RGD1 in promoting osteogenic differentiation of hBMSCs which can lead to future applications in clinical bone engineering.