Abstract
The human gastrointestinal tract is colonized by a vast community of symbionts and commensals. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) form a group of related, low-GC-content, gram-positive bacteria that are considered to offer a number of probiotic benefits to general health. While the role of LAB in gastrointestinal microecology has been the subject of extensive study, little is known about how commensal prokaryotic organisms directly influence eukaryotic cells. Here, we demonstrate the generation of multipotential cells from adult human dermal fibroblast cells by incorporating LAB. LAB-incorporated cell clusters are similar to embryoid bodies derived from embryonic stem cells and can differentiate into endodermal, mesodermal, and ectodermal cells in vivo and in vitro. LAB-incorporated cell clusters express a set of genes associated with multipotency, and microarray analysis indicates a remarkable increase of NANOG, a multipotency marker, and a notable decrease in HOX gene expression in LAB-incorporated cells. During the cell culture, the LAB-incorporated cell clusters stop cell division and start to express early senescence markers without cell death. Thus, LAB-incorporated cell clusters have potentially wide-ranging implications for cell generation, reprogramming, and cell-based therapy.
Highlights
Living organisms have been classified on the basis of cell structure into two groups: the eukaryotes and the prokaryotes
After 2–3 days incubation, cell clusters (30– 100 clusters; 500,000 cells) were generated similar to the embryoid bodies formed by human embryonic stem cells at an early stage (Fig. 1 A–B), while no cell clusters were observed from LABunincorporated adult human dermal fibroblasts (HDFs) (Fig. S1A)
Cell clusters were generated from GFP-expressing mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) incorporated with Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) (Lactobacillus acidophilus; JCM 1021) (Fig. S3A–C)
Summary
Living organisms have been classified on the basis of cell structure into two groups: the eukaryotes and the prokaryotes. Genomic analyses have shown that bacteria can be as widely divergent in their evolutionary history as any prokaryote is from any eukaryote. The prokaryotes comprise two distinct groups that are called the eubacteria and the archaebacteria. The living world has three major divisions: eubacteria, archaebacteria, and eukaryotes [1]. The generation of eukaryotic cells can be explained by the endosymbiotic theory, which was advanced and substantiated with microbiological evidence [2]. It is widely believed that eubacteria infected archaebacteria, genomic DNA was transferred to the archaebacteria, and they evolved into eukaryotic cells [1]
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