Telocytes within human skeletal muscle stem cell niche

Abstract

Human skeletal muscle tissue displays specific cellular architecture easily damaged during individual existence, requiring multiple resources for regeneration. Congruent with local prerequisites, heterogeneous muscle stem cells (MuSCs) are present in the muscle interstitium. In this study, we aimed to characterize the properties of human muscle interstitial cells that had the characteristic morphology of telocytes (TCs). Immunocytochemistry and immunofluorescence showed that cells with TC morphology stained positive for c-kit/CD117 and VEGF. C-kit positive TCs were separated with magnetic-activated cell sorting, cultured in vitro and expanded for study. These cells exhibited high proliferation capacity (60% expressed endoglin/CD105 and 80% expressed nuclear Ki67). They also exhibited pluripotent capacity limited to Oct4 nuclear staining. In addition, 90% of c-kit positive TCs expressed VEGF. C-kit negative cells in the MuSCs population exhibited fibroblast-like morphology, low trilineage differential potential and negative VEGF staining. These results suggested that c-kit/CD117 positive TCs represented a unique cell type within the MuSC niche.

Telocytes are the common cell of origin of both PEComas and GISTs: an evidence-supported hypothesis

“…VEGF is expressed in GISTs, in angiomyolipomas and in lymphangioleiomyomatosis [27, 28] (telocytes have positive expression for VEGF [6, 9, 29, 30]. …”

Ultrastructural and immunohistochemical characteristics of telocytes in the skin and skeletal muscle of newborn rats

“…Telocytes were previously detected in a number of tissues/organs including; heart (Bani et al, 2010;Hinescu et al, 2006;Rusu et al, 2012), blood vessels (Cantarero et al, 2011), endometrium (Hatta et al, 2012), placenta (Suciu et al, 2010), exocrine pancreas , parotid glands , trachea (Zheng et al, 2011), lungs (Hinescu et al, 2011;Popescu et al, 2011a,b), pleura (Hinescu et al, 2011) skeletal muscle (Bojin et al, 2011), uterus and fallopian tube (Cretoiu et al, 2009), jejunum (Cretoiu et al, 2012a), urinary tract * Correspondence address: Department of Histology and Cell Biology, Faculty of Medicine, Mansoura University, Egypt.…”

Telocytes in Pregnancy-Induced Physiological Liver Growth

“…Since their identification in 2010, TCs have been found in various mammalian organs and tissues and contribute to form a complex interstitial network for the maintenance of tissue homeostasis, such as heart [17][18][19][20][21], lung [22][23][24], placenta [25], pancreas [26,27], skin [28,29], skeletal muscle [30][31][32], uterus [33][34][35][36][37][38], urinary system [39][40][41], and others [42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. Furthermore, increasing evidence has demonstrated the presence of TCs within stem cell niches [23,29,31,49,56,57] and indicated the potential involvement of TCs in tissue regeneration/repair after injury [32,38,…”