Tissue Eng Regen Med.  2022 Apr;19(2):389-401. 10.1007/s13770-021-00402-8.

Induction of Salivary Gland-Like Tissue by Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells In Vitro

• Meng C
• Huang S
• Cheng T
• Zhang X
• Yan X

• KMID: 2528132
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1007/s13770-021-00402-8

Abstract

BACKGROUND
To investigate the in vitro induction of salivary gland-like tissue by ips cells in an interferon regulatory factor 6 (IRF6) overexpression and parotid conditioned medium environment.
METHODS
Urine-derived ips cells were isolated, identified, transfected with IRF6 and cultured in parotid conditioned medium to induce ips cells into salivary gland differentiation, morphological changes of ips cells were observed, CCK-8 was used to determine the cell proliferation efficiency and transcriptome sequencing was used to detect the expression of genes related to parotid gland formation.
RESULTS
Immunofluorescence staining showed that the isolated ips cells were positive for NANOG, SSEA4 and OCT4 and had embryonic-like stem cell characteristics; CCK-8 showed that there was no statistical difference in the proliferation efficiency between the IRF6⁺ induced group and the simple induced group after induction of ips cells into salivary glands. The results of transcriptome sequencing showed that there were a total of 643 differentially expressed genes, including 365 up-regulated genes and 278 down-regulated genes in the IRF6⁺ induced group compared to the blank control group, and the salivary gland related genes HAPLN1, CCL2, MSX2, ANXA1, CYP11A1, HES1 and LUM were all highly expressed in the IRF6⁺ induced group.
CONCLUSION
IRF6 promotes salivary gland differentiation in urine-derived iPSCs, and its mechanism of promoting differentiation may be that IRF6 upregulates the expression of HAPLN1, CCL2, MSX2, ANXA1, CYP11A1, HES1 and LUM to promote epithelial differentiation.

Keyword

iPS cells; Salivary gland; Stem cell technology