Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-11-2021
Publication Title
International Journal of Biological Sciences
Volume
17
Issue
15
First page number:
4192
Last page number:
4206
Abstract
Bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs) are multipotent stromal cells that have a critical role in the maintenance of skeletal tissues such as bone, cartilage, and the fat in bone marrow. In addition to providing microenvironmental support for hematopoietic processes, BM-MSCs can differentiate into various mesodermal lineages including osteoblast/osteocyte, chondrocyte, and adipocyte that are crucial for bone metabolism. While BM-MSCs have high cell-to-cell heterogeneity in gene expression, the cell subtypes that contribute to this heterogeneity in vivo in humans have not been characterized. To investigate the transcriptional diversity of BM-MSCs, we applied single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) on freshly isolated CD271+ BM-derived mononuclear cells (BM-MNCs) from two human subjects. We successfully identified LEPRhi CD45low BM-MSCs within the CD271+ BM-MNC population, and further codified the BM-MSCs into distinct subpopulations corresponding to the osteogenic, chondrogenic, and adipogenic differentiation trajectories, as well as terminal-stage quiescent cells. Biological functional annotations of the transcriptomes suggest that osteoblast precursors induce angiogenesis coupled with osteogenesis, and chondrocyte precursors have the potential to differentiate into myocytes. We also discovered transcripts for several clusters of differentiation (CD) markers that were either highly expressed (e.g., CD167b, CD91, CD130 and CD118) or absent (e.g., CD74, CD217, CD148 and CD68) in BM-MSCs, representing potential novel markers for human BM-MSC purification. This study is the first systematic in vivo dissection of human BM-MSCs cell subtypes at the single-cell resolution, revealing an insight into the extent of their cellular heterogeneity and roles in maintaining bone homeostasis.
Keywords
Adipogenesis; Bone marrow; Chondrogenesis; Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC); Osteogenesis; Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq)
Disciplines
Microbiology | Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience
File Format
File Size
2961 KB
Rights
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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Repository Citation
Wang, Z.,
Li, X.,
Yang, J.,
Gong, Y.,
Zhang, H.,
Qiu, X.,
Liu, Y.,
Zhou, C.,
Chen, Y.,
Greenbaum, J.,
Cheng, L.,
Hu, Y.,
Xie, J.,
Yang, X.,
Li, Y.,
Schiller, M. R.
(2021).
Single-Cell Rna Sequencing Deconvolutes the in Vivo Heterogeneity of Human Bone Marrow-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells.
International Journal of Biological Sciences, 17(15),
4192-4206.
http://dx.doi.org/10.7150/ijbs.61950