A time series study on BMP6 induced osteoblast differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC)

BMP6 mediated osteoblast differentiation plays a key role in skeletal development and bone disease. Unfortunately, the signaling pathways regulated by BMP6 are largely uncharacterized due to both a lack of data and the complexity of the response. To better characterize the signaling pathways responsive to BMP6, we conducted a time series microarray study to track BMP6 induced osteoblast differentiation and mineralization. Human MSC cells underwent osteogenic induction with BMP6 treatment for 0 hours, 8 hours, 24 hours, and 96 hours, which correspond to four phenotypic groups, i.e. control, preosteoblast (no mineralization), (sub-maximal) mineralization, and maximal mineralization at 14 days after the initiation of BMP treatment (18 days in total). Cells were harvested at 8 hours, 24 hours, 96 hours and 10 days for microarray profiling. Assays were run in duplicate for a total of 26 arrays. We only used 20 arrays in the reference paper.