Silk Nanofibrous Scaffold Improves Glial Differen-tiation of Embryonic Stem Like Cells

Background: Stem cell therapy accompanied with optimal scaffolds, is a promising treatment in neural tissue engineer-ing strategies via serving an appropriate microenvironment to induce neuroglial differentiation in damaged neural tissue. Here we fabricated a silk Nano fibrous scaffold as a microenviron-ment for glial guiding differentiation of Embryonic stem like cells.Materials and Methods: Embryonic stem like cells, were seeded and cultured on Silk scaffolds. The glial differentiation was induced using a modified technique includes culturing in the presence of Retinoic acid following addition of neurobasal medium supplemented with 10 ng/ml Epidermal Growth Fac-tor, 20 ng/ml basic Fibroblastic Growth Factor for 10 days. The glial differentiation was analyzed via the evaluation of specific markers; Nestin, Oligodendrocyte transcription factor (Olig2) and O4 via immunocytochemistry and real-time technique.Results: Our dates proved that silk scaffold support the differ-entiation of Embryonic stem like cells cells in to glial cells. The expression of Nestin, OLIG2 and O4 markers were signifi-cantly higher in the experiment group in compare to monolayer control group.Conclusion: This study suggests fabrication of the electrospun silk Nano fibrous scaffold as a biological substitutes for glial differentiation of stem cells that is a crucial step in tissue engi-neering for neural tissue repair and regeneration.

Keywords:

Silk , Differentiation , Tissue Engineering , Embryonic Stem Cells , Scaffold