Myogenic commitment of human stem cells by myoblasts Co-culture: a static vs. a dynamic approach

Abstract

An <i>in-vitro</i> model of human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (<i>h</i>BM-MSCs) myogenic commitment by synergic effect of a differentiation media coupled with human primary skeletal myoblasts (<i>h</i>SkMs) co-culture was developed adopting both conventional static co-seeding and perfused culture systems. Static co-seeding provided a notable outcome in terms of gene expression with a significant increase of <i>Desmin</i> (141-fold) and <i>Myosin heavy chain II</i> (MYH2, 32-fold) at day 21, clearly detected also by semi-quantitative immunofluorescence. Under perfusion conditions, myogenic induction ability of <i>h</i>SkMs on <i>h</i>BM-MSCs was exerted by paracrine effect with an excellent gene overexpression and immunofluorescence detection of MYH2 protein; furthermore, due to the dynamic cell culture in separate wells, western blot data were acquired confirming a successful cell commitment at day 14. A significant increase of anti-inflammatory cytokine gene expression, including IL-10 and IL-4 (15-fold and 11-fold, respectively) at day 14, with respect to the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-12A (7-fold at day 21) and IL-1β (1.4-fold at day 7) was also detected during dynamic culture, confirming the immunomodulatory activity of <i>h</i>BM-MSCs along with commitment events. The present study opens interesting perspectives on the use of dynamic culture based on perfusion as a versatile tool to study myogenic events and paracrine cross-talk compared to the simple co-seeding static culture.