Park, Min Hee
(Department of Animal Life Science, Kangwon National University)
Park, Ji Eun
(Division of Applied Animal Science, Kangwon National University)
Kim, Min Seong
(Department of Animal Life Science, Kangwon National University)
Lee, Kwon Young
(College of Veterinary Medicine and Institute of Veterinary Science, Kangwon National University)
Yun, Jung Im
(College of Veterinary Medicine and Institute of Veterinary Science, Kangwon National University)
Choi, Jung Hoon
(College of Veterinary Medicine and Institute of Veterinary Science, Kangwon National University)
Lee, Eunsong
(College of Veterinary Medicine and Institute of Veterinary Science, Kangwon National University)
Lee, Seung Tae
(Department of Animal Life Science, Kangwon National University)
Despite many researches related with in-vitro culture of porcine spematogonial stem cells (SSCs), adherent culture system widely used has shown a limitation in the maintenance of porcine SSC self-renewal. Therefore, in order to overcome this obstacle, suspension culture, which is known to have numerous advantage over adherent culture, was applied to the culture of porcine SSCs. Porcine SSCs retrieved from neonatal testes were suspension-cultured for 5 days or 20 days, and characteristics of suspension-cultured porcine SSCs including proliferation, alkaline phosphatase (AP) activity, and self-renewal-specific gene expression were investigated and compared with those of adherent-cultured porcine SSCs. As the results, the suspension-cultured porcine SSCs showed entirely non-proliferative and significantly higher rate of AP-positive cells and expression of self-renewal-specific genes than the adherent-cultured porcine SSCs. In addition, long-term culture of porcine SSCs in suspension condition induced significant decrease in the yield of AP staining-positive cells on post-day 10 of culture. These results showed that suspension culture was inappropriate to culture porcine SSCs, because the culture of porcine SSCs in suspension condition didn't stimulate proliferation and maintain AP activity of porcine SSCs, regardless of culture periods.