Fig. 2

nsPEFs promote OCT4 and NANOG expressions with increasing demethylation level of promoter. a qRT-PCR for the expressions of OCT4 and NANOG of pMSCs and hMSCs at 2 h after stimulation by nsPEFs. (3 batches of studies were tested with 3 biological donors, values are mean ± SEM from one representative batch with 5 technical repeats, one-way ANOVA. *p ≤ 0.05; **p ≤ 0.01, ***p ≤ 0.001, ****p ≤ 0.0001, NS, p > 0.05) b Bisulfite sequencing analysis of OCT4 and NANOG promoter of pMSCs at 2 h after stimulation by nsPEFs. Each CpG is represented by a circle in the 50–30 orientation; each row represents the methylation state of each CpG in one bacterial clone of PCR product. White circle indicates unmethylated CpG; black circle indicates methylated CpG. c Percentage of CpG demethylation for each promoter. (Values are mean ± SD, n = 3, one-way ANOVA, *p = 0.0329, *p = 0.0171)