DEPARTAMENTO DE CIÊNCIAS DA VIDA ... - Estudo Geral

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I.3 - Project rationale and experimental approach
I.3.1 - Typical MSCs Isolation
Typically, MSCs are isolated and cultured on polystyrene culture dishes (Secco
et al., 2008) and eventually transferred onto compliant substrates after several
passages to assess their plasticity in terms of lineage-specific expression markers, as
reported in case of osteogenic-, myogenic- or neural-like commitment (Engler et al,
2006).
Nevertheless, MSCs might retain memory (Tse and Engler, 2011) from the
extremely high stiffness of polystyrene, possibly restraining their full potential in terms
of lineage commitment.
I.3.2 - Durotaxis, Tissue Elasticity and MSCs “memory”
It has been shown that MSCs, even within shallow durotactic gradients, migrate
towards the stiffer matrix (durotaxis) and then differentiate into a more contractile
cell, but this behavior seems to be hampered by some degree of ‘memory’ that the
cells apparently retain from the previous soft environment from which they migrated
(Tse and Engler, 2011). MSCs can remain plastic and express differentiation program(s)
triggered by stiffness from a region in which they previous resided (Tse and Engler,
2011).