BackgroundMesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) hold great promise for the treatment of difficult diseases. As MSCs represent a rare cell population, ex vivo expansion of MSCs is indispensable to obtain sufficient amounts of cells for therapies and tissue engineering. However, spontaneous differentiation and aging of MSCs occur during expansion and the molecular mechanisms involved have been poorly understood.Methodology/Principal FindingsHuman MSCs in early and late passages were examined for their expression of genes involved in osteogenesis to determine their spontaneous differentiation towards osteoblasts in vitro, and of genes involved in self-renewal and proliferation for multipotent differentiation potential. In parallel, promoter DNA methylation and hostone H3 acetylation levels were determined. We found that MSCs underwent aging and spontaneous osteogenic differentiation upon regular culture expansion, with progressive downregulation of TERT and upregulation of osteogenic genes such as Runx2 and ALP. Meanwhile, the expression of genes associated with stem cell self-renewal such as Oct4 and Sox2 declined markedly. Notably, the altered expression of these genes were closely associated with epigenetic dysregulation of histone H3 acetylation in K9 and K14, but not with methylation of CpG islands in the promoter regions of most of these genes. bFGF promoted MSC proliferation and suppressed its spontaneous osteogenic differentiation, with corresponding changes in histone H3 acetylation in TERT, Oct4, Sox2, Runx2 and ALP genes.Conclusions/SignificanceOur results indicate that histone H3 acetylation, which can be modulated by extrinsic signals, plays a key role in regulating MSC aging and differentiation.

Xenotransplantation of human cells into immunodeficiency mice has been frequently used to study stem cells in tissue repair and regeneration and cancer cell metastasis. However, a sensitive and reproducible method to quantify cell engraftment lacks. Here, we developed a Real-Time PCR-based method which facilitated consistent detection and quantification of small amounts of human cells distributed in mouse organs after infusion. The principle of the method was to directly detect a humans-specific sequence in the human-murine genomic DNA mixture. In a mouse myocardial infarction model, the Real-Time PCR-based method consistently determined the amounts of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) engrafted into the heart and other organs 7 days after infusion of as little as 2.5 × 10(5) cells, indicating a high sensitivity, and the amounts of hMSCs detected in mice highly correlated to the numbers of hMSCs transplanted. Importantly, different from previous PCR-based methods, our method produced highly consistent and reproducible results. The reliability of the method was further proven by parallel analyses of DiI-labeled hMSCs in tissue sections and in single cell suspensions of mice. Our data show that the present human genomic DNA-specific primers-based Real-Time PCR method is sensitive and highly reproducible in determining the amount of xenotransplanted human cells in murine tissues.

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