Protein expression profile in the differentiation of rat bone marrow stromal cells into Schwann cell-like cells

During the last decade, increasing evidence suggested that bone marrow stromal cells (MSCs) have the potential to differentiate into neural lineages. Many studies have reported that MSCs showed morphological changes and expressed a limited number of neural proteins under experimental conditions. However, no proteomic studies on MSCs differentiated into Schwann cell-like cells have been reported. In this study, we isolated MSCs from adult Sprague-Dawley rat femur and tibia bone marrows and induced the cells in vitro under specific conditions. By using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE), we compared the protein profiles of MSCs before and after induced differentiation. We obtained 792 protein spots in the protein profile by 2-DE, and found that 74 spots changed significantly before and after the differentiation using PDQuest software, with 43 up-regulated and 31 down-regulated. We analyzed these 74 spots by a matrix assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS) and by database searching, and found that they could be grouped into various classes, including cytoskeleton and structure proteins, growth factors, metabolic proteins, chaperone proteins, receptor proteins, cell cycle proteins, calcium binding proteins, and other proteins. These proteins also include neural and glial proteins, such as BDNF, CNTF and GFAP. The results may provide valuable proteomic information about the differentiation of MSCs into Schwann cell-like cells.