Usage Of Plant Lectins As Marker Molecules For Screening Pancreatic Stem/Progenitor Cells

Diabetes is one of the three difficult medicine diseases at present. Scholars are hoping to search and induced pancreatic stem cells to generate new beta cells through the studies of pancreas development and stem cells. So far, the potential pancreatic stem cells are not well identified, thus their proliferation and differentiation characteristics progress are not well known.The lectins are non-immune sources but can specially combine with the sugar base or their conjugates which are widely present in plants, animals and microorganisms. The lectins have ability to agglutinate red blood cells, thus they are also known as the hemagglutinin. The plant lectin can specifically recognize the epitope of carbon lipid compounds in the membrane glycoprotein or glycopeptide, and thus they can act as important tools for the studying of interaction between cellsIn this study, we use fluorescence histochemistry method to explore the usage of plant lectin in screening of mouse pancreatic stem/progenitor cells. Four kinds of plant lectins (PNA, PHA, BS, DBA) were studied in the normal pancreas, developing pancreas and regenerating pancreas. The results showed that:(1) PNA, PHA and BS can mark pancreatic acinar cells, but they do not mark pancreatic ductal and insular cells;(2) Comparing to PHA and BS, PNA can not mark stem/progenitor cells at the embryonic stage, but it can mark the differentiated acinar cells in the adult pancreas, thus PNA can be used as a negative marker for screening pancreatic stem/progenitor cells;(3) The cell lineage molecule Factor-8or Sca-1can be used with PNA to exclude the vascular endothelial cells;(4) DBA can specificially combine the ductal epithelial cells, and it can be used in conjunction with PNA as pancreatic stem/progenitor cell screening markers;(5) HSA can recognize the acinar, ductal and vascular endothelial cells, and it can also be used in conjunction with PNA as pancreatic stem/progenitor cell screening markers. This study provides a clue for isolation, identification, and purification of pancreatic stem/progenitor cells through flow cytometry sorting using negative cell surface markers. Also, plant lectins can be used in the early identification and separation of cell types in mouse pancreas.