Effects of neoglycosylated collagen on neuronal differentiation

Glycans participate in neural cell migration, neurite outgrowth and synapse formation in both the developing and adult nervous system. Understanding their functions would improve the knowledge in the mechanisms that determine nervous system differentiation and regeneration and could lead to the use of glycans as therapeutic strategies for neurological disorders. For this reason we studied the effects of native and glycosylated collagen (glc-collagen) on neuronal differentiation by using a neuroblastoma, dorsal root ganglion-derived cell line (F11). The choice of cells was motivated by their capability to differentiate into neurons when exposed to differentiating agents. We compared the behaviour of cells plated on native and glc-collagen with cells seeded on petri dishes. After 7 days, the electrophysiological properties of cells were analysed by the patch-clamp technique in the whole-cell configuration. Sodium current densities showed the tendency to increase from petri dishes to collagen and to glc-collagen and significantly higher potassium current densities were calculated for cells plated on glc-collagen. Mean resting membrane potential was very depolarized in cells from the petri dishes but showed a trend to hyperpolarize in cells plated on collagen and was significantly more negative on glc-collagen. The electrical activity was tested by applying depolarizing current pulses by the patch-electrode; in petri dishes, the majority of the cells showed slow depolarisations which were not able to reach 0 mV, on the contrary, the fraction of cells able to generate action potentials was significantly higher on collagen and reached almost the totality on glc-collagen. Our data show for the first time F11 cells differentiated without the use of chemical and differentiating agents and suggest that glc-collagen is an efficient material to be employed for neuronal differentiation.