Genetic modification does not affect the stemness of neural stem cells in nestin promoter-GFP transgenic mice

Abstract Because nestin promoter-GFP mice have frequently been used in neural stem cell (NSC) research, it is essential to prove that there is no alteration in the stemness of NSCs derived from this transgenic model for the interpretation and validity of the data. We compared the stemness of NSCs derived from transgenic mice expressing GFP driven by the nestin enhancer with those from wild-type (C57BL/6) mice with respect to the general gene expression profile, expression of neural stem cell markers as nestin and Sox2, and responsiveness to neurotrophins (BDNF, PDGF-BB, and NT-3). The gene expression profile analysis showed that the coefficient of correlation between the two groups was very high ( r  = 0.9865) in the total genes. We found that 23 genes were either up- or down-regulated more than two-fold in the NSCs from the transgenic mice ( p