Abstract
Mechanical compression is a double-edged sword for cartilage remodeling, and the effect of mechanical compression on chondrogenic differentiation still remains elusive to date. Herein, we investigate the effect of mechanical dynamic compression on the chondrogenic differentiation of human synovium-derived mesenchymal stem cells (SMSCs). To this aim, SMSCs encapsulated in agarose hydrogels were cultured in chondrogenic-induced medium with or without dynamic compression. Dynamic compression was applied at either early time-point (day 1) or late time-point (day 21) during chondrogenic induction period. We found that dynamic compression initiated at early time-point downregulated the expression level of chondrocyte-specific markers as well as hypertrophy-specific markers compared with unloaded control. On the contrary, dynamic compression applied at late time-point not only enhanced the levels of cartilage matrix gene expression, but also suppressed the hypertrophic development of SMSCs compared with unloaded controls. Taken together, our findings suggest that dynamic mechanical compression loading not only promotes chondrogenic differentiation of SMSCs, but also plays a vital role in the maintenance of cartilage phenotype, and our findings also provide an experimental guide for stem cell-based cartilage repair and regeneration.
Highlights
Cartilage damage caused by osteoarthritis (OA) or traumatic injury has become a major clinical problem, affecting a large number of people worldwide
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have become an ideal selection for the regeneration of cartilage, and several studies have been performed with different kinds of MSCs such as bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs)
BMSCs show great potentials in bone regeneration, the ability of BMSCs for cartilage regeneration remains limited considering the fact that BMSCs display a much great tendency for osteogenesis during chondrogenic differentiation (Djouad et al, 2005; Pelttari et al, 2006; De Bari et al, 2008)
Summary
Cartilage damage caused by osteoarthritis (OA) or traumatic injury has become a major clinical problem, affecting a large number of people worldwide. As the articular tissue has a limited capacity to regenerate, current treatment is inefficient and not able to restore the function and mobility of damaged cartilage (Smith et al, 2005). Surgical treatments such as microfracture and autograft cartilage transplantation have shown great improvement but still result in fibrillation of Delayed Compression Promotes SMSC Chondrogenesis cartilage, lacking in function and mobility of native cartilage. In this manner, there is great demand for the advanced techniques for the regeneration of cartilage (Bedi et al, 2010). Synovium-derived mesenchymal stem cells (SMSCs) are considered as an ideal cell resource for cartilage tissue engineering due to their higher chondrogenic potential compared with other kinds of tissue-derived MSCs such as bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) (Sakaguchi et al, 2005; Pei et al, 2008)
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