Comparative study of myocytes from normal and mdx mice iPS cells

Recently, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) have been derived from various techniques and show great potential for therapy of human diseases. Furthermore, the iPS technique can be used to provide cell models to explore pathological mechanisms of many human diseases in vitro, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), which is a severe recessive X-linked form of muscular dystrophy without effective treatment. In this study, we try to determine whether there are different characteristics of myocytes from mdx iPS cells and C57BL/10 iPS cells. Our results showed that both of mdx and C57BL/10 cells could be induced into iPS cells in vitro, whereas colony-forming ability of mdx iPS cells was much weaker than that of C57BL/10 iPS cells. Meanwhile, mdx iPS cells could be induced to differentiate into myocytes, whereas their differentiation efficiency was much lower than that of C57BL/10 iPS cells. And, the number of apoptotic cells in differentiated myocytes from mdx iPS cells was significantly higher than that from C57BL/10 iPS cells. More importantly, treatment of a pan-caspase inhibitor (Z-VAD) produced a significant decrease in apoptotic cells. This study might add some insight to the biology study of dystrophin gene.