Fig. 1

Morphology and stemness marker gene expression between pMSCs and UC-MSCs at P4. a A typical microscopic image of a confluent monolayer of pMSCs or UC-MSCs growing in plastic tissue culture plates. pMSCs displayed a spindle shape, and UC-MSCs cobble-stone like morphology. Bar: 100 μm. b The expression (relative mRNA) of a panel of stemness marker genes, which was presented as fold changes (2^−ΔΔCt) and determined using RT-qPCR as compared to the internal β-Actin control. Data are presented as the mean ± standard deviation (SD). The different expression of a gene in between pMSCs (n = 9 donors) and UC-MSCs (n = 7 donors) was analyzed using two-tailed t-test. *Statistically significant (NANOG, p = 0.0169; OCT4, p = 0.0284; SOX2, p = 0.034; CCNA2, p = 0.0223; RAD21, p = 0.0272; and EXO1, p = 0.039), **marginally significant (C-MYC, p = 0.0595; MCM6, p = 0.0648). This experiment was repeated three times in triplicate using independently prepared cDNAs, and the results were exhibited in almost identical patterns