Chair of Medical Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Jagiellonian University Medical College, Kopernika 7, 31-034 Krakow, Poland.
Department of Transplantation, Institute of Pediatrics, Jagiellonian University Medical College, Wielicka 265, 30-663 Kraków, Poland.
Int J Mol Sci. 2019 Sep 5;20(18):4351. doi: 10.3390/ijms20184351.
Wharton's jelly mesenchymal stem cells (WJ-MSCs) are multipotent stem cells that can be used in regenerative medicine. However, to reach the high therapeutic efficacy of WJ-MSCs, it is necessary to obtain a large amount of MSCs, which requires their extensive in vitro culturing. Numerous studies have shown that in vitro expansion of MSCs can lead to changes in cell behavior; cells lose their ability to proliferate, differentiate and migrate. One of the important measures of cells' migration potential is their elasticity, determined by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and quantified by Young's modulus. This work describes the elasticity of WJ-MSCs during in vitro cultivation. To identify the properties that enable transmigration, the deformability of WJ-MSCs that were able to migrate across the endothelial monolayer or Matrigel was analyzed by AFM. We showed that WJ-MSCs displayed differences in deformability during in vitro cultivation. This phenomenon seems to be strongly correlated with the organization of F-actin and reflects the changes characteristic for stem cell maturation. Furthermore, the results confirm the relationship between the deformability of WJ-MSCs and their migration potential and suggest the use of Young's modulus as one of the measures of competency of MSCs with respect to their possible use in therapy.
牙髓间质干细胞（WJ-MSCs）是多能干细胞，可用于再生医学。然而，要达到 WJ-MSCs 的高治疗效果，就必须获得大量的 MSCs，这需要对其进行广泛的体外培养。许多研究表明，MSC 的体外扩增会导致细胞行为发生变化；细胞失去增殖、分化和迁移的能力。细胞迁移潜力的一个重要衡量标准是其弹性，由原子力显微镜（AFM）测定，并通过杨氏模量进行量化。这项工作描述了 WJ-MSCs 在体外培养过程中的弹性。为了确定能够穿越的特性，通过 AFM 分析了能够穿过内皮单层或 Matrigel 的 WJ-MSCs 的变形性。我们表明，WJ-MSCs 在体外培养过程中表现出不同的变形性。这种现象似乎与 F-肌动蛋白的组织密切相关，反映了干细胞成熟的特征变化。此外，研究结果证实了 WJ-MSCs 的变形性与其迁移潜力之间的关系，并表明可以使用杨氏模量作为衡量 MSC 能力的指标之一，以评估其在治疗中的可能用途。
