Isolation , Culture And Characterization Of Human Prostatic Stem Cells

Stem cells are characterized by the capacity of self-renewing and unlimited proliferation and differentiation. The recent researches revealed that stem cells are closely related with some severe diseases as cancers, which involve in the process of their occurrence, progression and treatment. The studies of the prostatic stem cells are apparently behind the studies of other tissue stem cells, just because of the difficulty in exploring specific surface markers and isolating the prostatic parenchymal cells. There are some evidences support the fact that prostatic stem cells are located in the prostatic basal cells layers. Our experimental objects are to explore and develop the methods to isolate the human prostate stem cells and to identify their biological features. Based on the principal of the property of stem cells fast adhering to collagen, we adopt mainly immunologic magnetic beads to isolate prostate epithelial stem cells. Subsequently, the clone analysis and the expression of integrin α2β1 of human prostatic putative stem cells from basal cells were undertaken. We also compare the biological features of stem cells from normal prostate tissues and BPH tissues respectively. A little group of cells isolated from prostatic basal cells show the familiar properties of some stem cells as epidermal stem cells, including their fast adherence to collagen I ,high level of of integrin α2β1 expression and high clone forming efficiency (CFE), which are much more than other basal cells. Furthermore, the CFE of stem cells from normal prostate (67.8%) is much higher than that of stem cells from the tissues of BPH(6.5%). We concluded that the methods mainly including magnetic microbeads cells sorting are proper alternative for isolating prostatic stem cells with high purity, although it needs some essential perfection to promote the isolating ration of prostatic stem cells .