NGF regulates survival and differentiation of umbilical mesenchymal stem/stromal cells into GABAergic, dopaminergic and cholinergic lineages

Mesenchymal stem cells advantageous properties have led scientists to conduct trials on a range of medical conditions, including incurable neurodegenerative diseases. Wharton-Jelly derived mesenchymal stem cells, given their ease of collection, are frequently selected for these studies. This research aimed to investigate the effects of nerve growth factor (NGF) gene overexpression on the neural differentiation, survivability, and gene and protein expression of these cells. The level of gene expression was tested using the ddPCR method.

Six umbilical cords from donors were collected, and three randomly chosen primary cultures of Wharton-Jelly derived mesenchymal stem cells were used in experiment. Cells were transduced with lentiviral vectors and underwent a 12-day differentiation process.

The results revealed neuron-like cells with significantly high expression of CHAT, GAD2 and TH genes. A corresponding increase in protein expression was also observed. Immunostaining demonstrated notable differences in neuron-like phenotypes, contingent on the environmental conditions of the research groups. Throughout the experiment, samples with transduced mesenchymal stem cells overexpressing the NGF gene showed the highest expression levels from almost all of studied genes and proteins, and were also the most phenotypically similar to neuron-like cells.

The study concluded that sustained overexpression of NGF:

guides mesenchymal stem cells towards the neural pathway,

facilitates the differentiation of modified mesenchymal stem cells into GABAergic, dopaminergic, and cholinergic neuron-like cells,

suggests that GABAergic neurons’ marker predominantly co-expresses with other neurons’ markers, such as cholinergic or dopaminergic ones,

increases survivability of modified mesenchymal stem cells in toxic conditions;

The limitations of the study is that we merely know that cells have begun to express neurogenic markers, but in the absence of standards for mature neuronal markers, we do not yet know how far they have progressed as differentiating cells.