Isolation, in vitro culture and characterization of foal umbilical cord stem cells at birth

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) isolated from bone marrow (BM) and umbilical cord of human, canine, guinea pig, and rat have been shown to differentiate into several tissues. The aim of this work was to investigate the possibility of isolating pluripotent precursor cells from equine BM and compare them with umbilical cord matrix cells and amniotic epithelial cells. BM samples were obtained from adult horses by Histopaque gradient centrifugation and cultured in monolayer. Adherent fibroblast-like cells were tested for their stemness by known specific markers. Evidence for MCS lineage was made via reverse transcription-PCR. After adding EGF, horse BM-MSCs adopted a fibroblast-like morphology and, as expected, expressed Sox-2, Oct-4 and Nanog. They did not expressed a negative marker such as CD34. GADPH expression was used as internal control. Umbilical cord cells showed a similar morphology.