Stem cells can be purified by plant lectin

According to the report of the US physicist organization network on September 9 (Beijing time), scientists have used lectin produced by plants to separate stem cells from mixed cells for the first time, overcoming the huge problem of complications caused by impure stem cells in stem cell therapy and research The new method is more widely used, safer and cheaper Stem cells have important application potential in basic research and treatment of many diseases including spinal cord injury In general, scientists induce stem cells to differentiate into specific cell types (such as neural cells), and then inject them into the body to repair spinal cord injury However, the differentiated cells obtained by this method are often mixed with some undifferentiated pluripotent cells These cells are injected into the patient together with the differentiated cells, which will develop and form tumors in the patient, bringing huge security risks So it is very important to separate stem cells from mixed cells effectively So far, however, almost all purification methods have focused on the development of animal antibodies, which are not only expensive, but also cause safety problems in the treatment Now, the research team led by Jenny ronin, a developmental neurobiologist at Scripps Institute, and Japanese scientists are using a protein array produced by plants called lectin for the first time to test cell elements rather than the whole cell The results show that the protein named glycoprotein on sugar and stem cells can reliably bind to some lectins They then found the best agglutinin binding to stem cells, then attached the agglutinin to the beads and exposed the beads to a mixture of stem cells (a variety of embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cell lines from us and Japanese laboratories) and non stem cells The results showed that in each experiment, stem cells attached to the beads well, and almost all non stem cells were washed away, which means that the two kinds of cells can be purified separately during the experiment or treatment Wang Youjie, the lead author of the study, said the lectin purification method is expected to be as versatile as stem cells themselves and can be used in many stem cell therapies currently under development In addition to low cost and high reliability, lectin produced by plants will not only be more than 100 times cheaper, but also will not cause safety problems Many basic researches need to extract stem cells or differentiated cells separately For example, the team of Luoning is developing a neural cell that can be used to treat autism caused by known gene variation, and the new purification method is expected to greatly improve the experimental efficiency The team is also looking for other attachment patterns that allow them to purify specific non stem cells as well In addition, since stem cells all seem to produce glycoprotein, scientists hope to obtain information related to pluripotency from glycoprotein, so as to clarify basic problems related to pluripotency.