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. 2017 Apr 10;7(7):1820–1834. doi: 10.7150/thno.18614

Figure 4.

Figure 4

Characterizations of the biological functions of the Pdot-labeled MSCs. A) Proliferation profiles of the MSCs incubated with R8-Pdots for 24 hours and further cultured for 24 h, 48 h and 72 h in fresh medium. The unlabeled MSCs were used as control. B) Chondrogenic differentiation of unlabeled MSCs and the Pdot-labeled MSCs characterized by Safranin O staining. Fluorescence imaging and Safranin O staining were performed 30 days after the induced differentiation. Scale bar represents 50 μm. C) Western blot analysis of tumorigenicity of the Pdot-labeled MSCs, by using HeLa cells as a control. D) Stem-cell marker expressions of the Pdot-labeled MSCs. Confocal fluorescence imaging showed that the Pdot-labeled MSCs retained robust expression of the stem cell markers such as OCT-4, NANOG and SSEA-4 three days after the Pdot-labeling. The microtubule labeling was also shown as a positive control for the labeling methods. The green channel showed the marker expression. The red and blue channels represented the fluorescent of Pdots and Hoechst 33258, respectively. Scale bar represents 50 μm.