Tiam Mana Saffari

116 CHAPTER 6 Quantitative PCR analysis Paracrine environment To understand the local cellular environment near the nerve repair site, we examined the relative expression of angiogenic and neurotrophic markers in rats in which the nerve defect was reconstructed with autograft, allograft or allograft wrapped around with a SIEF flap at two weeks (Figure 2). Expression of angiogenic markers including Cd34, Pecam1/Cd31, Vegfa and Mmp2 exhibited a significant increase in SIEF samples (0.050±0.011, 0.774±0.123 0.367±0.101 and 5.175±1.207 for these markers, respectively) compared to autograft nerve (0.012±0.005, 0.222±0.025, 0.075±0.007 and 1.365±0.065 for these markers, respectively, P<0.05). Expression values for allograft samples were 0.024±0.005 for Cd34, 0.681±0.167 for Pecam1, 0.152±0.020 for Vegfa and 2.628±0.437 for Mmp2. The relative expression of neurotrophic markers such as Gdnf, Ngf, Pmp22 and Ptn was also analyzed. Expression of Gdnf and Ngf, was below or near the level of detection (smaller than 0.02, data not shown). Pmp22 demonstrated significantly increased expression of allograft nerves (0.882±0.118) compared to autograft (0.446±0.099, P<0.05) and SIEF nerves (0.182±0.030, P<0.05) (Figure 2). Expression levels of Ptn revealed superiority of autograft (0.417±0.043, P<0.01) and allograft (0.312±0.036, P<0.05) compared to SIEF (0.105±0.012), but the expression levels that were detected are relatively low. These results indicate that the addition of an adipofascial flap to the nerve allograft repair modifies the paracrine environment.