Maryam Nazm Bojnordi, Ebrahimi-Barough S, Vojoudi E, and Ghasemi H
The limited capacity of the central nervous system in repairmen of neuronal population such as dopaminergic neuron cells suggests stem cell therapy for neurogenesis in Parkinson’s disease. Also, stem cell therapy accompanied with scaffolds, is a promising treatment in neural tissue engineering to induce neural differentiation in damaged tissue of brain. Here we fabricated and used a silk Nano fibrous scaffold for differentiation of embryonic stem like cells in to dopaminergic neuron cells. Embryonic stem cells were cultured on fabricated Silk scaffolds. The neural differentiation was induced using a modified technique includes; culturing in the presence of Retinoic acid and neurobasal medium with 10 ng/ml epidermal growth factor, 20 ng/ml basic fibroblastic growth factor for 10 days. The neural differentiation was investigated using the evaluation of specific markers via immunocytochemistry and real-time technique. Our dates proved that silk scaffold support the differentiation of embryonic stem cells in to dopaminergic neuron. The expression of neural specific markers were significantly higher in the cells were cultured on fabricated Silk scaffolds in compare to monolayer control group. Electro spun silk Nano fibrous scaffold is considered a biological substitute for neural differentiation of stem cells that is a crucial step in tissue engineering for neural tissue repair and regeneration.
The nervous system is composed of specialized cells organized in complex networks with the ability to integrate and adopt signals from different tissues and organs. The nervous system receives sensorial inputs from the outside environment and sends signals to the periphery cells and muscles to execute simple and complex motor commands. In the brain, variable distribution of neural networks that have not yet been completely deciphered supports cognitive abilities such as verbal, visual learning, and memory. Like other tissues, the neural tissue is subjective to senescence, degeneration, and occasional damage. However, the nervous system shows a poor regeneration potential, which is still a motive of controversy. Many efforts of regenerative medicine focus on providing “fresh” cells to structurally and functionally replace neural cells lost after degeneration or trauma. Stem cell (SC) delivery is a popular therapy due to their pluripotency and multipotency ability for direct differentiation into neural lineages and/or the release of specific factors that can stimulate endogenous neurogenesis and self-repairing mechanisms.
