Plasma treatment in conjunction with EGM-2 medium increases endothelial and osteogenic marker expressions of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells Chih-Hsin Lin 1 , Shyh-Yuan Lee 1,2 , and Yuan-Min Lin 1,2, * 1 Department of Dentistry, National Yang-Ming University, No.155, Sec.2, Linong Street, Taipei 112, Taiwan 2 Department of Stomatology, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei 112, Taiwan Received: 12 April 2016 Accepted: 23 June 2016 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 ABSTRACT For many tissue engineering applications, an important goal is to create func- tional tissues in vitro. In order to make such tissues viable, they have to be vascularized. Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) are a promising candidate for vascularization. Growth supplements are commonly used to induce BMSCs differentiation, and further improvements in differentiation conditions can be achieved by modifying the cells’ growth environment, such as pretreating the culture dish with gas plasma to modify the surface functional groups that the cells are seeded on. In this work, we compare the effects of different gas plasmas on the growth and differentiation of BMSCs. We treat the growth dish with different plasmas (CO 2 ,N 2 , and O 2 ) and induce BMSC dif- ferentiation on them with endothelial growth medium-2 (EGM-2). We find that EGM-2 by itself does not have strong effect on endothelial differentiation. However, we find that plasma treatment markedly increases the mRNA expression of endothelial cell markers. Interestingly, we also find that the upregulation of osteogenic markers. The data show that plasma treatment in conjunction with EGM-2 can enhance BMSCs differentiation into both endothelial-like cells and osteogenic-like cells. The effects of EGM-2 on BMSCs differentiation are influenced by the plasma-modified surface of the substrate. Our findings provide a method to enhance EGM-2-based cell differentiation, with consequences for tissue engineering and stem cell biology applications. Introduction The engineering of large tissues or even entire organs is a very active and promising field of research. A critical factor for any engineered tissue is the ability to support it with a suitable vasculature, without which the tissue would be very limited in size and at risk of necrosis. Past research indicates that endothelial cell (EC) and endothelial progenitor cell are among the best candidates for vascular network Address correspondence to E-mail: ymlin@ym.edu.tw DOI 10.1007/s10853-016-0170-7 J Mater Sci