Abstract
Current functional assessment of biomaterial-induced stem cell lineage fate in vitro mainly relies on biomarker-dependent methods with limited accuracy and efficiency. Here a "Mesenchymal stem cell Differentiation Prediction (MeD-P)" framework for biomaterial-induced cell lineage fate prediction is reported. MeD-P contains a cell-type-specific gene expression profile as a reference by integrating public RNA-seq data related to tri-lineage differentiation (osteogenesis, chondrogenesis, and adipogenesis) of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) and a predictive model for classifying hMSCs differentiation lineages using the k-nearest neighbors (kNN) strategy. It is shown that MeD-P exhibits an overall accuracy of 90.63% on testing datasets, which is significantly higher than the model constructed based on canonical marker genes (80.21%). Moreover, evaluations of multiple biomaterials show that MeD-P provides accurate prediction of lineage fate on different types of biomaterials as early as the first week of hMSCs culture. In summary, it is demonstrated that MeD-P is an efficient and accurate strategy for stem cell lineage fate prediction and preliminary biomaterial functional evaluation.