Open Access

ARTICLE

Influence of the microenvironment on gene and protein expression of odontogenic-like and osteogenic-like cells

by ANDREA P. RODRIGUEZ, HIDETSUGU TSUJIGIWA, MEHMET GUNDUZ, BEYHAN CENGIZ, NORIYUKI NAGAI, RYO TAMAMURA, SILVI

Department of Oral Pathology and Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Okayama University, 2-5-1 Shikata-Cho, Okayama 700-8558, Japan.
* Address correspondence to: Hitoshi Nagatsuka. Fax: (+81) 86-235-6654. E-mail: jin@md.okayama-u.ac.jp

BIOCELL 2009, 33(1), 39-47. https://doi.org/10.32604/biocell.2009.33.039

Abstract

Progenitor cells play an important biological role in tooth and bone formation, and previous analyses during bone and dentine induction have indicated that they may be a good alternative for tissue engineering. Thus, to clarify the influence of the microenvironment on protein and gene expression, MDPC23 cells (mouse dental papilla cell line) and KUSA/A1 cells (bone marrow stromal cell line) were used, both in vitro cell culture and in intra-abdominal diffusion chambers implanted in 4-week-old male immunodefficient mice (SCID mice). Our results indicate that KUSA/A1 cells differentiated into osteoblast-like cells and induced bone tissue inside the chamber, whereas, MDPC-23 showed odontoblast-like characteristics but with a low ability to induce dentin formation. This study shows that MDPC-23 cells are especial cells, which possess morphological and functional characteristics of odontoblast-like cells expressing dentin sialophosphoprotein in vivo. In contrast, dentin sialophosphoprotein gene and protein expression was not detected in both cell lines in vitro. The intra-abdominal diffusion chamber appears as an interesting experimental model for studying phenotypic expression of dental pulp cells in vivo.

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