Gene Expression Analysis Of Cardiomyocytes Differentiated From Human Bone-Marrow Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells

Adult human bone marrow (BM) is the major source of mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) for cell-based therapies. This study focuses to identify, isolate and characterize the mesenchymal stem cells that are believed to be present in BM. In the present study, six samples of human bone-marrow were collected. The key attributes like isolation efficiency, cell yield, colony-forming unit-fibroblast (CFU-F) frequency, phenotypic characteristics, and multi-lineage differentiation capacity were determined for the isolated MSCs from bone marrow specimens. It was observed that the bone marrow possessed a good number of nucleated cells and had a high yield of adherent cells. Moreover, the characteristics of BM-MSC, such as adherent capacity to surface of the T flask, fibroblastic-like morphology, colony forming unit and immunophenotype were observed. Further, when those MSCs were analyzed for their specific marker expression using flowcytometry, they were found to be positive for CD29, CD73, CD90, and CD105 and negative for CD34 and CD45 stem cell markers respectively. Apart from this, it was observed that those MSCs, when induced to differentiate into cardiomyocytes, they successfully differentiated into cardiomyocyte like cells with flat, wide, myotube like structure with sarcomeric organization, which were later confirmed to be cardiomyocytes by qRT-PCR. Thus, this study shows that MSCs were isolated from human bone-marrow and subsequently differentiated into cardiomyocytes with 100% success rate. And hence, this study suggests that human bone marrow is a potential source of mesenchymal stem cells that could be differentiated in to ccardiomyocytes and used for cell based therapies for treating various cardiovascular diseases.