miR-21 promotes the differentiation of hair follicle-derived neural crest stem cells into Schwann cells
Yuxin Ni
Kaizhi Zhang
Xuejuan Liu
Tingting Yang
Baixiang Wang
Li Fu
Lan A
Yanmin Zhou
摘要：Hair follicle-derived neural crest stem cells can be induced to differentiate into Schwann cells in vivo and in vitro. However, the underlying regulatory mechanism during cell differentiation remains poorly understood. This study isolated neural crest stem cells from human hair folli-cles and induced them to differentiate into Schwann cells. Quantitative RT-PCR showed that microRNA (miR)-21 expression was gradually increased during the differentiation of neural crest stem cells into Schwann cells. After transfection with the miR-21 agonist (agomir-21), the differentiation capacity of neural crest stem cells was enhanced. By contrast, after transfection with the miR-21 antagonist (antagomir-21), the differentiation capacity was attenuated. Further study results showed that SOX-2 was an effective target of miR-21. Without compromising SOX2 mRNA expression, miR-21 can down-regulate SOX protein expression by binding to the 3′-UTR of miR-21 mRNA. Knocking out the SOX2 gene from the neural crest stem cells significantly reversed the antagomir-21 inhibition of neural crest stem cells differentiating into Schwann cells. The results suggest that miR-21 expression was increased during the differentiation of neural crest stem cells into Schwann cells and miR-21 promoted the differentiation through down-regu-lating SOX protein expression by binding to the 3′-UTR of SOX2 mRNA.
机标关键词：Schwann cellsstem cellsprotein expressioncell differentiationmRNA expressionhuman hairin vitro
资助基金：the National Natural Science Foundation of China, (No.81070855)
论文发表日期：2014-01-01
在线出版日期：2025-08-15（本平台首次上网日期，不代表文献的发表时间）
页数：9( 828-836 )
英文信息