Abstract
Graphene consists of two-dimensional sp2-bonded carbon sheets, a single or a few layers thick, which has attracted considerable interest in recent years due to its good conductivity and biocompatibility. Three-dimensional graphene foam (3DG) has been demonstrated to be a robust scaffold for culturing neural stem cells (NSCs) in vitro that not only supports NSCs growth, but also maintains cells in a more active proliferative state than 2D graphene films and ordinary glass. In addition, 3DG can enhance NSCs differentiation into astrocytes and especially neurons. However, the underlying mechanisms behind 3DG's effects are still poorly understood. Metabolism is the fundamental characteristic of life and provides substances for building and powering the cell. Metabolic activity is tightly tied with the proliferation, differentiation, and self-renewal of stem cells. This study focused on the metabolic reconfiguration of stem cells induced by culturing on 3DG. This study established the correlation between metabolic reconfiguration metabolomics with NSCs cell proliferation rate on different scaffold. Several metabolic processes have been uncovered in association with the proliferation change of NSCs. Especially, culturing on 3DG triggered pathways that increased amino acid incorporation and enhanced glucose metabolism. These data suggested a potential association between graphene and pathways involved in Parkinson's disease. Our work provides a very useful starting point for further studies of NSC fate determination on 3DG.
Highlights
Neural stem cells (NSCs) have received much attention in recent years as a therapeutic candidate for many neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) (Soldner et al, 2009; Swistowski et al, 2010; Kang et al, 2016), and much research has focused on uncovering the detailed mechanisms behind neural stem cells (NSCs) fate determination
Different metabolites were compared among the three groups in volcano plots (Supplementary Figure 3), and the results indicated higher metabolic activities in NSCs grown on 3DG compared to those grown on 2D graphene film (2DG) and tissue culture polystyrene (TCPS)
Study has reported that graphene oxide can be used in cell imaging without any additional fluorescent protein (Cheng et al, 2018)
Summary
Neural stem cells (NSCs) have received much attention in recent years as a therapeutic candidate for many neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) (Soldner et al, 2009; Swistowski et al, 2010; Kang et al, 2016), and much research has focused on uncovering the detailed mechanisms behind NSCs fate determination. NSC fate is affected by extracellular and intracellular factors, especially the particular microenvironment in which the NSC is located as well as metabolic state of the cell (Kim et al, 2014). Several studies have reported that metabolic pathways are regulators of NSC proliferation and differentiation fate decisions, but the detailed mechanisms behind this regulation are still not fully understood.
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