human embryonic and mesenchymal stem cells

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) are self-renewing multipotent cells which hold great potential in stem cell-based therapy. MSC can be derived from multiple adult tissues but require invasive harvesting and imply donor-to-donor differences. MSC derived from embryonic stem cells (ESC) may provide an alternative source not suffering from those limitations, but to what extend they correspond to the adult counterpart is not known. Here we characterized human ESC-derived MSC in-depth and compared them to human adult tissue-derived MSC (bone marrow BM-MSC) as well as to hESC using next-generation RNA sequencing. In MSC we observed enrichment of proteins involved in cell adhesion, wound healing, extracellular matrix generation, as well as vesicle-mediated transport and exosomes, with the latter pointing towards paracrine signaling. The enrichment and variety of developmental terms associated with MSC further suggest the support function in tissue regeneration. The observed differences between ESC-and adult tissue derived-MSC are similar in magnitude to those reported for MSC of different origin and the former may thus represent an alternative source for therapeutic applications.