Human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stromal/stem cells retain their trophic repair and immunoregulatory properties but lose their multipotent differentiation capacity after extensive ageing in vitro

To assess the hierarchical importance of multipotent differentiation compared with trophic/immunoregulatory functions of MSCs, we have undertaken a detailed analysis of how these properties change with in vitro ageing of the cells. Using in vitro differentiation and repair models and integrating transcriptomics and proteomics data, we show that the multipotent differentiation capacity of MSCs falls with increasing passage, whereas trophic repair and immunoregulatory potency are maintained. In total four cell lines were profiled using Illumina whole genome RNA-seq. Cell lines were isolated from four individuals. RNA was extracted from each cell line at passage 1, 5, 10 and 15 for a total of 16 samples. Two samples (PN251_p15, PN241_p10) were sequenced twice to improve sequencing depth.