Abstract
Previous studies in direct co-culture system showed that cell-cell interactions promotes ECM expression and cell alignment. However, the effect of cell-cell interaction in direct co-culture system has not been fully understood. In this study, we developed a novel direct co-culture system to study the effect of cell-cell interaction between human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (hBMSCc) and human articular chondrocytes (hACs). We observed that direct co-culturing produced more aggrecan expression than mono-culturing or indirect co-culturing. The experiment results showed that the expression level of aggrecan mRNA was high in the order of direct co-culturing, indirect co-culturing and mono-culturing. In addition, the mRNA expression level in hBMSCs and hACs is clearly different in the direct co-culture system. It suggested that our direct co-culture system is possible to observe the mRNA expression for each cell after co-culturing. Therefore, we concluded that the presented co-culture system provides a simple and robust model to study the cell-cell interaction of direct co-culturing.
