A Modified Preplate Technique for Efficient Isolation and Proliferation of Mice Muscle-derived Stem Cells

We modified an existing protocol to develop a more efficient method to acquire and culture muscle-derived stem cells (MDSCs) and compared the characteristics of cells obtained from the two methods. This method is based on currently used multistep enzymatic digestion and preplate technique. During the replating process, we replaced the traditional medium with isolation medium to promote fibroblast-like cell adherence at initial replating step, which shortened the purifying duration by up to 4 days. Moreover, we modified the culture container to provide a stable microenvironment that promotes MDSC adherence. We compared the cell morphology, growth curve and the expression of specific markers (Sca-1, CD34, PAX7 and Desmin) between the two cell groups separately obtained from the two methods. Afterwards, we compared the neural differentiation capacity of MDSCs with other muscle-derived cell lineages. The protocol developed here is a fast and effective method to harvest and purify MDSCs from mice limb skeletal muscle.