Neural stimulation on human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells by extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields

Adult stem cells are considered multipotent. Especially, human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hBM-MSCs) have the potential to differentiate into nerve type cells. Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are widely distributed in the environment, and recently there have been many reports on the biological effects of EMFs. hBM-MSCs are weak and sensitive pluripotent stem cells, therefore extremely low frequency-electromagnetic fields (ELF-EMFs) could be affect the changes of biological functions within the cells. In our experiments, ELF-EMFs inhibited the growth of hBM-MSCs in 12 days exposure. Their gene level was changed and expression of the neural stem cell marker like nestin was decreased but the neural cell markers like MAP2, NEUROD1, NF-L, and Tau were induced. In immunofluorescence study, we confirmed the expression of each protein of neural cells. And also both oligodendrocyte and astrocyte related proteins like O4 and GFAP were expressed by ELF-EMFs. We suggest that EMFs can induce neural differentiation in BM-MSCs without any chemicals or differentiation factors.