Open Access

ARTICLE

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

ANDREA P. RODRIGUEZ, HIDETSUGU TSUJIGIWA, MEHMET GUNDUZ, BEYHAN CENGIZ, NORIYUKI NAGAI, RYO TAMAMURA, SILVIA S. BORKOSKY, TOHRU TAKAGI, MIHO INOUE, HITOSHI NAGATSUKA*

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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