Bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) exhibit multiple traits of a stem cell population, and they can expand many times in vitro and be induced to differentiate into multiple cell types. Several neurotrophins mediate the survival, differentiation, growth and apoptosis of neuron by binding to the neurotrophin factor receptor. Brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is known to have important functions for in neuronal survival in the nervous system, it enhances stem cells` ablilty to differentiate into neural cells and it promotes plasticity in vitro and in vivo. In this study, we investigated the effect of BDNF on the neural differentiation of rat BMSCs. The effect of BDNF on the neural differentiation of rat BMSCs was examined via imunocytofluorescence, western blotting and FACS analysis of specific neural markers in the neural induction condition and the BDNF-treated neural induction condition. According to our results, the expression of neural markers was higher in the BDNF treated neural induction condition compared to in the neural induction condition. Theses results show that BDNF promotes the neural differentiation of rat BMSCs.