Myocardin and pdx-1 synergistically induce hMSCs to differentiate into insulin secreting cells

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been reported as an attractive source for the generation of transplantable surrogate β cells. The objective of this study was to investigate a new method to induce the differentiation of hMSCs into insulin secretion cells and to explore its molecular mechanisms. In this study, we investigated in vitro differentiation of hMSCs by overexpression of myocardin and pdx-1. Differentiated cells were evaluated by immunocytochemistry, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), quantificational real-time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) and Western blotting. Furthermore, the molecular mechanisms were evaluated by chip assay, CO-IP and Luciferase assay. This study reported a new method to induce the differentiation of hMSCs into insulin secretion cells. The method is cotransduction of myocardin and pdx-1 for 7days. At the same time, we find myocardin and pdx-1 can form a complex to promote the transactivities of insulin by affecting the formation of the pdx-1/myocardin/SRF/CArG complex both in vitro and in vitro. The present study provided a simple and faithful in vitro model for further investigating the cell replacement therapy for diabetes.