Basic Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Stem Cells. Oct 26, 2017; 9(10): 179-186
Published online Oct 26, 2017. doi: 10.4252/wjsc.v9.i10.179
Aldehyde dehydrogenase activity helps identify a subpopulation of murine adipose-derived stem cells with enhanced adipogenic and osteogenic differentiation potential
Harumichi Itoh, Shimpei Nishikawa, Tomoya Haraguchi, Yu Arikawa, Shotaro Eto, Masato Hiyama, Toshie Iseri, Yoshiki Itoh, Munekazu Nakaichi, Yusuke Sakai, Kenji Tani, Yasuho Taura, Kazuhito Itamoto
Harumichi Itoh, Shimpei Nishikawa, Tomoya Haraguchi, Yu Arikawa, Kazuhito Itamoto, Department of Small Animal Clinical Science, Joint Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Yamaguchi University, Yamaguchi 753-8511, Japan
Shotaro Eto, Masato Hiyama, Kenji Tani, Yasuho Taura, Department of Veterinary Surgery, Joint Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Yamaguchi University, Yamaguchi 753-8511, Japan
Toshie Iseri, Yoshiki Itoh, Munekazu Nakaichi, Department of Veterinary Radiology, Joint Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Yamaguchi University, Yamaguchi 753-8511, Japan
Yusuke Sakai, Department of Veterinary Pathology, Joint Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Yamaguchi University, Yamaguchi 753-8511, Japan
Author contributions: Itoh H performed the majority of experiments and wrote the paper; Itoh H, Arikawa Y, Eto S, Iseri T and Itoh Y contributed for data analysis and acquisition of unpublished essential data and reagents; Itoh H, Nishikawa S, Haraguchi T, Nakaichi M, Tani K, Taura Y and Itamoto K designed research and analyzed data; all the authors contributed to this article.
Supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research) for Nishikawa S, No. 26893172.
Institutional review board statement: The study was performed without any human sample or any kind of human patient involvement.
Institutional animal care and use committee statement: The animal experiments were approved by the institutional animal experiment ethics committee of Yamaguchi University (Approval No. 245).
Conflict-of-interest statement: Authors have no conflicts of interest.
Data sharing statement: Data are available from the corresponding author (sn2007@yamaguchi-u.ac.jp).
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Shimpei Nishikawa, BvetMed, PhD, Department of Small Animal Clinical Science, Joint Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Yamaguchi University, 1677-1 Yoshida, Yamaguchi 753-8511, Japan. sn2007@yamaguchi-u.ac.jp
Telephone: +81-83-9335931 Fax: +81-83-9335878
Received: April 24, 2017
Peer-review started: April 26, 2017
First decision: June 6, 2017
Revised: August 28, 2017
Accepted: September 12, 2017
Article in press: September 13, 2017
Published online: October 26, 2017
Processing time: 182 Days and 18.8 Hours
Abstract
AIM

To identify and characterize functionally distinct subpopulation of adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs).

METHODS

ADSCs cultured from mouse subcutaneous adipose tissue were sorted fluorescence-activated cell sorter based on aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) activity, a widely used stem cell marker. Differentiation potentials were analyzed by utilizing immunocytofluorescece and its quantitative analysis.

RESULTS

Approximately 15% of bulk ADSCs showed high ALDH activity in flow cytometric analysis. Although significant difference was not seen in proliferation capacity, the adipogenic and osteogenic differentiation capacity was higher in ALDHHi subpopulations than in ALDHLo. Gene set enrichment analysis revealed that ribosome-related gene sets were enriched in the ALDHHi subpopulation.

CONCLUSION

High ALDH activity is a useful marker for identifying functionally different subpopulations in murine ADSCs. Additionally, we suggested the importance of ribosome for differentiation of ADSCs by gene set enrichment analysis.

Keywords: Adipose-derived stem/stromal cell; Aldehyde dehydrogenase activity; Flow cytometry; Subpopulation; Ribosome

Core tip: Aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) activity is widely used as a stem cell marker in several types of normal or malignant tissues. However, there was no report of ALDH activity in murine adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs). Here, our study demonstrated a subpopulation defined by high ALDH activity within murine ADSCs. The subpopulation with high ALDH activity (ALDHHi) showed enhanced differentiation potentials into adipocyte and osteocyte. Furthermore, gene set enrichment analysis revealed that ribosome-related gene sets were enriched in ALDHHi of murine ADSCs. We showed relationship between ALDHHi and ribosome biosynthesis, providing a novel insight of mesenchymal stem cell biology.