Background: Emerging evidence suggests that miR-124 performs important biological functions in neural stem cells (NSCs); it regulates NSC behavior and promotes the differentiation of NSCs into neurons, but the exact molecular mechanism remains unknown. And also, the role of miR-124 during spinal cord injury regeneration is unclear. Materials and methods: In order to explore the function of miR-124 in neural differentiation, the molecular markers (Tuj1, Map2, and GFAP) correlated with the differentiation of NSCs were detected by immunofluorescence staining both in cultured mouse spinal cord progenitor cells (SC-NPCs) and in spinal cord injury (SCI) animal models. The migration ability and apoptosis of cultured SC-NPCs were also evaluated by Transwell migration assay and TUNEL assay. In addition, the relative expression of lnRNA Neat1-and Wnt/β-catenin signaling-related genes were detected by quantitative real-time PCR. Results: In this study, we revealed that lncRNA Neat1 is involved in regulating Wnt/β-catenin signaling that is activated by miR-124 in SC-NPCs. LncRNA Neat1 was also found to play an important role in regulating neuronal differentiation, apoptosis, and migration of SC-NPCs. Furthermore, we demonstrated that overexpression of miR-124 resulted in elevated Neat1 expression, accompanied with the functional recovery of locomotion in a mouse model of spinal cord injury. Conclusions: Our results confirm the therapeutic effectiveness of miR-124 on the functional recovery of injured spinal cord, supporting the rationale and feasibility of miR-124 for spinal cord injury treatment in future clinical therapy. Furthermore, we concluded that the miR-124-Neat1-Wnt/β-catenin signaling axis is involved in regulating the cell function of SC-NPCs, and this may offer novel therapeutic avenues for future treatment of SCI.
A two-component design strategy developed by us and other research groups, where a second component is used to control the triplet excited state properties of the luminescent component (the first component), has been shown to allow a flexible choice of building blocks to prepare high-performance afterglow materials with intriguing properties. Here, we report the realization of intense organic afterglow and diverse functions by extending this two-component strategy to dopant-matrix systems, which feature small k F , small k P , and very small k nr + k q . With coronene molecules and deuterated coronene being fixed as luminescent dopants, variation of organic matrices reveals that either small-molecule organic matrices or polymeric matrices can be used to accommodate coronene molecules and largely reduce k nr + k q values, leading to the emergence of very bright organic afterglow at ambient conditions. The obtained coronene-matrix materials have been found to be readily processed into desired shapes, large-area thin films, and aqueous afterglow dispersions by melt casting and other techniques, function as efficient afterglow donors for the fabrication of red afterglow materials, and exhibit promising time-gated bioimaging functionality to avoid interference from strong fluorescence backgrounds.
Neural stem/progenitor cell (NSPC)-based spinal cord injury (SCI) therapy is expected to bridge the lesion site by transplanting exogenous NSPCs for replacement of lost cells. The transplanted NSPCs produce a...
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