Background: Wharton’s jelly is an unlimited source of stem cells that can be used in cell therapy and tissue engineering without any ethical concern. It has been revealed the cell-free extract could be effective to induce cell differentiation. The objective of this study was to induce Wharton’s jelly-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) into hepatocyte-like cells by premeabilization of the cel...

background: in recent years we have successfully adopted an in vitro hepatogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (mscs). in this protocol the biologically active hepatocyte-like cells were differentiated from the stem cells isolated from either bone marrow or umbilical cord blood (ucb) samples. the aim of the present study was to compare the efficiency of the hepatogenic differentiati...

Isolated primary hepatocytes, which are widely used for pharmacological and clinical purposes, usually undergo certain periods of cold storage in suspension during processing. While adherent hepatocytes were shown previously to suffer iron-dependent cell death during cold (4 °C) storage and early rewarming, we previously found little iron-dependent hepatocyte death in suspension but severely de...

The inhibition of gap junctional intercellular communication (GJIC) is a common effect of nongenotoxic carcinogens and might be a biomarker for these agents. To further test this relationship, we hypothesized that phenobarbital would inhibit mouse hepatocyte GJIC and this would correlate with strain-specific hepatocarcinogenicity. Phenobarbital is a strong nongenotoxic hepatocarcinogen in B6C3F...

chloroacetaldehyde (caa) is a chlorination by-product in finished drinking water and a toxic metabolite of a wide variety of industrial chemicals (e.g. vinyl chloride) and chemotherapeutic agents (e.g. cyclophosphamide and ifosfamide). in this research, the cytotoxic mechanisms of caa in freshly isolated rat hepatocytes were investigated.caa cytotoxicity was associated with reactive oxygen spec...

dacarbazine (dtic) is a synthetic chemical antitumor agent which is used to treat malignant melanoma and hodgkin’s disease. dtic is a prodrug which is converted to an active form undergoing demethylation by liver enzymes. the active form prevents the progress of disease via alkylation of dna strand. in the structure of this drug, the imidazole ring, a triazen chain and carboxamide group exist. ...

The present work was performed to identify the subcellular localization of hepatic acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC). Cellular organelles involved in fatty acid oxidation that contain a malonyl-CoA sensitive carnitine palmitoyltransferase (CPT) activity or that are linked to the control of this activity were analysed for the presence of ACC. No significant amount of ACC was observed in the mitochond...

The uptake and internalization of a triglyceride emulsion by rat hepatocytes in culture less than 24 hr was either inhibited or uninfluenced by apoE. ApoE significantly increased the uptake of these emulsions in later cultures. Specific low density lipoprotein (LDL) binding was similar for hepatocyte monolayers prior to and after 24 hr. Rat hepatocytes in culture for 2 days, which were treated ...

Hepatocyte nuclear factor (HNF) 1 is a key transcription factor involved in the expression of many liver-specific genes. We have isolated and characterized the promoter region of the rat HNF1 gene. Transfection experiments revealed that a short region between -118 and -8 is crucial for cell type-specific expression of the HNF1 gene in the hepatoma cell line, HepG2 cells. This region contains tw...