Transplantation Of NSCs Promotes The Recovery Of Conduction Fuction Of Injuried Spinal Cord In Rats

Objectives:To evaluate the conduction functional recovery of acute injuried spinalcord after treated with transplantation of neural stem cells in rats. And the corticalsomatosensory evoked potentials (SEP), which reflect directly conduction of spinalcord, was applied to rats with spinal cord injuries.Methods:Neural stem cells were isolated from spinal cord of neonatal rats by usingserum-free culture and single cell clone test. In order to acquire a large number ofclones, clones were passaged continuously. Immunofluorescence was used to detectNestin antigen of the clone and specific antigen of mature neural cell after the clonedifferentiated. With the revised WD method of Allen, we set up the spinal cordinjuries models on T10 level and performed SEP continuously before and after injuryup to 5 months. The transplantation of BrdU-labeled cultured cells was performedimmediately after injury by stereotaxic technique. 96 female SD rats were randomlydivided into SCI group(group A) ,SCI treated with inactivated NSCs group (groupB) ,SCI treated with NSCs group(group C). And at 1 week,4 weeks,8 weeks,12weeks post transplantation, the methods such as immunofluorescence,SEP,CBS,CB-HRP retrogradely label were applied to identify the fate and therapeutic effect oftransplanted NSCs in vivo.Result: Cells isolated from spinal cord of neonatal rats express Nestin antigen andhave the potential to form and differentiate into neurons,gliacytes. In behavioralexamination, the hind limb function of the injuried rats was worse than the control(P﹤0.05). Standard SEP could be recorded stably before injury, while SEP disappearedafter injury and recovered partly not until 5 months later. Large numbers of BrdU-labelled stem cells were observed in the spinal cord of group C and βIII-tubulin-positive,GFAP-positive were also observed in these BrdU-labelled stem cells at 12weeks post transplantation. The rats treated with NSCs showed a significance of thedifference between group C and the others on the indexes of CBS,SEP andCB-HRP-positive cells.Conclusions:The spinal cord of neonatal rats contains neural stem cells. SEP, whichcould provide objective information of spinal cord about its conduction, is suitableand reliable to be applied on the research of experimental spinal cord injuries. NSCscan survive and engraft into the contused adult rat spinal cord. Moreover, thetransplanted NSCs were able to different into neuron and astrocytes and thereforepromote the axons regeneration.