Isolation of the multipotent MSC subpopulation from human gingival fibroblasts by culturing on chitosan membranes

Literature has different opinions regarding the percentage of mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-like population in human gingival tissue. Isolation of these cells is thus important for clinical applications. In this study, two typical but distinct types of gingival fibroblasts (GF), GF-A and GF-B, were grown from human gingival biopsies. They were characterized for surface markers by flow cytometry as well as the expressions of stemness and neural crest marker genes by RT-PCR. The two types of GF were slightly different in their surface markers; however, they had dramatic difference in the expression levels of stemness marker genes and neural crest marker genes. They also demonstrated distinct differentiation capacity. Upon the appropriate induction, GF-A were capable of osteogenic, adipogenic, chondrogenic, and neurogenic differentiation while GF-B only underwent osteogenic differentiation. By culturing either type of GF on chitosan membranes for 24 h, we were able to isolate two distinct subpopulations in each type of GF, i.e. cells with spheroid-forming ability (GF-AS and GF-BS) or those remained flat and attached (GF-AN and GF-BN). We further characterized these cells, and determined the common properties shared by the spheroid-forming subpopulation “S”, as well as those shared by the non-spheroid-forming subpopulation “N”. The subpopulation “S” was capable of the multilineage differentiation, while the subpopulation “N” was only efficient in osteogenic differentiation. GF-A and GF-B had different proportions of subpopulations. Chitosan as the cell culture substratum up-regulated the N-cadherin expression of the “S” but not “N” subpopulation, which may account for the cell sorting effect. This study showed that chitosan membranes could be used for isolation of the spheroid forming subpopulation in human GF that contained multipotent adult stem cells of which the number varied among donors and sites.