Research potential of multi-lineage chicken amniotic mesenchymal stem cells

Abstract

Amniotic mesenchymal stem cells (AMSCs) express octamer binding transcription factor 4 (Oct-4), which is necessary for maintaining the undifferentiated state of pluripotent stem cells. AMSCs also express CD29, CD44 and vimentin, which are specific markers of mesenchymal cells. We studied the biological characteristics and potential for cell therapy of AMSCs derived from 8-day-old chicken embryos. We induced the AMSCs to differentiate into adipocytes, osteoblasts and myocardial cells and used immunofluorescence, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assays to detect the expressions of specific markers of AMSCs and differentiated cells. To assess the differentiation capacity of AMSCs, passage four cells were induced to differentiate into adipocytes, osteoblasts and myocardial cells. These results suggested that AMSCs isolated from chicken embryos exhibited the characteristics of multipotent stem cells. AMSCs, therefore, may be potential candidates for cellular transplantation therapy and tissue engineering.

Key words::

• amniotic
• cells
• chickens
• embryos
• mesenchymal
• pluripotent
• stem cells

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Ministry of Agriculture of China for Transgenic Research Program (2011ZX08009-003-006, 2011ZX08012-002-06), the Central Level, Scientific Research Institutes for R & D Special Fund Business (2011cj-9, 2012zl072), the project of National Infrastructure of Animal Germplasm Resources (2013 year), the Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Program.

Authors’ contributions: X Li and Y Gao contributed equally to this work.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.