Differentiation of Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells into Neural Lineage Cells Induced by bFGF-Chitosan Controlled Release System

Figure 3

Morphological observation of BMSCs and differentiated cells with phase contrast microscopy. (a) BMSC morphology after 7 days of coculture in conditioned medium (CM). The cells did not show noticeable morphological changes compared with P3 BMSCs and retained a fibroblast-like shape. (b) BMSC morphology after 7 days of coculture with 20 ng soluble bFGF. (c) BMSC morphology after 7 days of coculture with chitosan alone. (d-f) Cell morphology after 3, 7, and 10 days of coculture with bFGF-chitosan: (d) after 3 days of coculture, the cells began to aggregate into neurosphere-like structures; (e) after 7 days of coculture, processes increasingly grew out of the neurosphere-like structures and formed contacts with adjacent neurosphere-like cells; and (f) after 10 days of coculture, the cell morphology substantially changed, and a network formed among cells. (g) Quantitative analyses of the ratios of process length to width. Data represent the means ± SE; bFGF-chitosan vs. bFGF, bFGF-chitosan vs. chitosan P <0.001. is the undegraded chitosan scaffold, scale bar for (a)-(e) is 50 μm and for (f) is 100 μm.

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