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Figure 5 Treatment of MSCs With GFs Enhanced Their Engraftment and Gap Junction Formation With CMCs and Reduced Apoptosis in the Infarcted Myocardium
(A and B) Representative figures of immunostaining at 2 and 8 weeks after MI. Transplanted MSCs, labeled with DiI (red) before injection and with DAPI (blue) at nuclei, were engrafted in the myocardium (unlabeled CMCs with DAPI nuclear staining only). There was significantly higher connexin-43 expression in the infarcted heart transplanted with the GF–pre-treated MSCs than with the untreated MSCs. Connexin-43 (green) was expressed between MSCs (arrows) or between MSCs and CMCs (arrowheads). (C) The percentage of MSCs expressing connexin-43 was significantly higher in the GF–pre-treated MSCs than in the untreated ones. (D) DiI-positive area, which might reflect the engraftment area of transplanted MSCs, was significantly greater in the heart transplanted with GF–pre-treated MSCs than with the untreated ones at 2 weeks after MI. The statistical significance was lost at 8 weeks. (E) Low-power views, which showed that DiI-positive area at 2 weeks was greater in the infarcted myocardium transplanted with GF–pre-treated MSCs than with naïve ones. (F) Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end-labeling (TUNEL) staining. (G) Immunohistochemistry for caspase-3. At 2 weeks after MI, apoptosis (arrows) was significantly lower in the infarcted heart transplanted with GF-pretreated MSCs than with untreated ones. (H) Three randomly selected fields in 2 separate slides/animal (n = 5 in each group) were counted. Abbreviations as in Figures 1, 2, and 5.
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