On Sept.29, Associate Professor PENG Lihua published the newest research entitled Plant Exosomes As Novel Nanoplatforms for MicroRNA Transfer Stimulate Neural Differentiation of Stem Cells In Vitro and In Vivo in Nano letters.

Differentiation of bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) into functional neural cells has been widely investigated for treating neural diseases. However, the limited neural differentiation of BMSCs remains a big challenge to overcome. Herein, for the first time, ginseng-derived exosomes (G-Exos) were demonstrated to have excellent efficiency in stimulating the neural differentiation of BMSCs by transferring the incorporated miRNAs to BMSCs efficiently. In vivo, a photo-cross-linkable hydrogel with chemokine and G-Exos loaded shows strong efficacy in recruiting and directing the neural differentiation of BMSCs in the program. G-Exos were demonstrated to be promising nanoplatforms in transferring plant-derived miRNAs to mammalian stem cells for neural differentiation both in vitro and in vivo, possessing great potential in neural regenerative medicine. 

This work was carried out by postgraduate student XU Xuehan under the supervision of Associate Professor PENG Lihua.

Link:https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c02530