Research Paper Volume 11, Issue 18 pp 7723—7745
Neural stem cell small extracellular vesicle-based delivery of 14-3-3t reduces apoptosis and neuroinflammation following traumatic spinal cord injury by enhancing autophagy by targeting Beclin-1
Figure 4. Overexpression of 14-3-3t promotes the anti-apoptotic effect of NSC-sEVs in rats with spinal cord injury. (A, B) Nissl staining indicating the number of motor neurons in each group. Scale bar = 50um. (C) Western blot analysis of apoptosis-related proteins after injury. (D, E) Semi-quantitative detection of expression levels of apoptosis-related proteins, normalized to GAPDH. (F) TUNEL staining was used to detect changes in neuronal apoptosis in each group. The proportion of TUNEL positive neurons in the NSC-sEVs group was lower than that in the SCI group. Scale bar = 100um. (G) Quantification of the number of TUNEL-positive neurons in each of the three experimental groups. * p < 0.05, compared to the SCI group; # p < 0.05, compared to the Ad-GFP-sEVs group. NSC-sEVs, neural stem cell-derived small extracellular vesicles; GAPDH, glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase; TUNEL, terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end labeling assay; SCI, spinal cord.