Which Medium and Ingredients Provide Better Morphological Differentiation of SH-SY5Y Cells?

Human SH-SY5Y cell line has been used as an in vitro model in neuroscience research. However, many researchers emphasized that there are many differences between differentiated and undifferentiated characteristics of SH-SY5Y. Although Retinoic Acid (RA) generally have been used for differentiation of SH-SY5Y cells, which protocol provides better differentiation have not been cleared yet. Therefore, we compared RA and the other mediums in different treatment periods for obtaining better differentiated, carrying a neuron-like phenotype (N-type) characteristics, of SH-SY5Y human cells. The cells were pre-treated with different mediums for different treatment periods and compared with both for each other and the control group. When we pre-treated the cells with RA for 5-day and followed by the Mix medium (Neurobasal, B27, db-cAMP, KCI) and BDNF, neurite length and MAP2 expression of the cells were found significantly higher than the control group. In conclusion, we showed that more than one agent (RA) is clearly necessary to reach better differentiation of SH-SY5Y cells.