Hematopoietic stem cell exhaustion impacted by p18 INK4C and p21 Cip1/Waf1 in opposite manners.

Transplantation-associated stress can compromise the hematopoietic potential of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). As a consequence, HSCs may undergo "exhaustion" in serial transplant recipients, for which the cellular and molecular bases are not well understood. Hematopoietic exhaustion appears to be accelerated in the absence of p21(Cip1/Waf1) (p21), a cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor (CKI) in irradiated hosts. Our recent study demonstrated that unlike loss of p21, deletion of p18(INK4C) (p18), a distinct CKI, results in improved long-term engraftment, largely because of increased self-renewing divisions of HSCs in vivo. We show here that HSCs deficient in p18 sustained their competitiveness to wild-type HSCs from unmanipulated young mice, and retained multilineage differentiation potential after multiple rounds of serial bone marrow transfer over a period of more than 3 years. Further, p18 absence significantly decelerated hematopoietic exhaustion caused by p21 deficiency. Such an effect was shown to occur at the stem cell level, likely by a counteracting mechanism against the cellular senescence outcome. Our current study provides new insights into the distinct impacts of these cell-cycle regulators on HSC exhaustion and possibly HSC aging as well under proliferative stress, thereby offering potential pharmacologic targets for sustaining the durability of stressed HSCs in transplantation or elderly patients.