Abstract
Conditioned medium obtained from bone marrow-derived stem cells has been proposed as a novel cell-free therapy in spinal cord injury and neuropathic pain, yet the direct effect on spinal neuron function has never been investigated. Here, we adopted spinal cord organotypic cultures (SCOCs) as an experimental model to probe the effect of ST2 murine mesenchymal stem cells-conditioned medium (ST2-CM) on dorsal horn (DH) neuron functional properties. Three days of SCOC exposure to ST2-CM increased neuronal activity measured by Fos expression, as well as spontaneous or induced firing. We showed that the increase in neuronal excitability was associated with changes in both intrinsic membrane properties and an enhanced excitatory drive. The increased excitability at the single-cell level was substantiated at the network level by detecting synchronous bursts of calcium waves across DH neurons. Altogether, SCOCs represent a viable tool to probe mesenchymal cells' effect on intact neuronal networks. Our findings indicate that ST2-CM enhances neuronal activity and synaptic wiring in the spinal dorsal horn. Our data also support the trophic role of mesenchymal cells CM in maintaining network activity in spinal circuits.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 2918-2928 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Stem Cell Reviews and Reports |
Volume | 19 |
Issue number | 8 |
Early online date | 6 Sept 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 6 Sept 2023 |
Bibliographical note
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicatedotherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Funder
This work was supported by the National Centre for the Replacement Refinement & Reduction of Animals in Research Crack It solution “Neuroinflammation and nociception in a dish” (https://nc3rs.org.uk/crackit/crack-it-news/new-solution-neuroinflammation-and-nociception-dish) fund.Keywords
- Mesenchymal stem/stromal cells
- Dorsal horn neurons
- Spinal cord organotypic cultures
- Firing activity
- Calcium imaging