Research Article Comparative Microarray Analysis of Proliferating and Differentiating Murine ENS Progenitor Cells

License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Postnatal neural progenitor cells of the enteric nervous system are a potential source for future cell replacement therapies of developmental dysplasia like Hirschsprung’s disease. However, little is known about the molecular mechanisms driving the homeostasis and differentiation of this cell pool. In this work, we conducted Affymetrix GeneChip experiments to identify differences in gene regulation between proliferation and early differentiation of enteric neural progenitors from neonatal mice. We detected a total of 1333 regulated genes that were linked to different groups of cellular mechanisms involved in cell cycle, apoptosis, neural proliferation, and differentiation. As expected, we found an augmented inhibition in the gene expression of cell cycle progression aswell as an enhancedmRNAexpression of neuronal and glial differentiationmarkers.We further found amarked inactivation of the canonicalWnt pathway after the induction of cellular differentiation. Taken together, these data demonstrate the various molecular mechanisms taking place during the proliferation and early differentiation of enteric neural progenitor cells. 1