Stress-Resistant Neural Stem Cells Positively Influence Regional Energy Metabolism After Spinal Cord Injury in Mice

The importance of stem cells to ameliorate the devastating consequences of traumatic injuries in the adult mammalian central nervous system calls for improvements in the capacity of these cells to cope, in particular, with the host response to the injury. We have previously shown, however, that in the acutely traumatized spinal cord local energy metabolism led to decreased ATP levels after neural stem cell (NSC) transplantation. As this might counteract NSC-mediated regenerative processes, we investigated if NSC selected for increased oxidative stress resistance are better suited to preserve local energy content. For this purpose, we exposed wild-type (WT) NSC to hydrogen peroxide prior to transplantation. We demonstrate here that transplantation of WT-NSC into a complete spinal cord compression injury model even lowers the ATP content beyond the level detected in spinal cord injury-control animals. Compared to WT-NSC, stress-resistant (SR) NSC did not lead to a further decrease in ATP content. These differences between WT- and SR-NSC were observed 4 h after the lesion with subsequent transplantation. At 24 h after lesioning, these differences were no more as obvious. Thus, in contrast to native NSC, transplantation of NSC selected for oxidative stress resistance can positively influence local energy metabolism in the first hours after spinal cord compression. The functional relevance of this observation has to be tested in further experiments.