The three-dimensional collagen scaffold improves the stemness of rat bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) show the great promise for the treatment of a variety of diseases because of their self-renewal and multipotential abilities. MSCs are generally cultured on two-dimensional (2D) substrate in vitro. There are indications that they may simultaneously lose their stemness and multipotentiality as the result of prolonged 2D culture. In this study, we used three-dimensional (3D) collagen scaffolds as rat MSCs carrier and compared the properties of MSCs on 3D collagen scaffolds with monolayer cultured MSCs. The results demonstrated that collagen scaffolds were suitable for rat MSCs adherence and proliferation. More importantly, compared to MSCs under 2D culture, 3D MSCs significantly maintained higher expression levels of stemness genes (Oct4, Sox2, Rex-1 and Nanog), yielded high frequencies of colony-forming units-fibroblastic (CFU-F) and showed enhanced osteogenic and adipogenic differentiation efficiency upon induction. Thus, 3D collagen scaffolds may be beneficial for expanding rat MSCs while maintaining the stem cell properties in vitro.