LAUSR

Activation of Protein Kinase AMP-Activated Catalytic Subunit Alpha (AMPKα) is an important regulatory pathway for osteogenic differentiation. STAT4 acts as a transcriptional activity factor to regulate the transcription of many genes and is potentially a regulatory factor for AMPKα transcription activity. To confirm the regulatory effect of STAT4 on AMPKα and the effect of STAT4 on osteogenic differentiation, the promoter sequence of AMPKα was analyzed via bioinformatics, the STAT4 overexpression vector was constructed and transfected into human osteoblast-like cells MG-63 by cationic liposome, fluorescence quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) and western blotting technologies were used to detect the effect of STAT4 on the expression of AMPKα. MTT and ALP activity assays were also used to verify the effect of STAT4 on the proliferation and maturation of osteoblasts by regulating AMPKα expression. Our results showed that STAT4 was a co-transcriptional regulator of AMPKα1 and AMPKα2, which combined the enrichment region of CpG on the promoter sequence of AMPKα1/2. Overexpression of STAT4 significantly increased the expression of AMPKα1 and AMPKα2, which promoted the proliferation and maturation of osteoblasts. We concluded that STAT4 was a transcriptional activator of AMPKα and promoting STAT4 expression enhances the proliferation and differentiation activity of AMPKα in osteoblasts.