A functionally characterized test set of human induced pluripotent stem cells

摘要

Human embryonic (ESC) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) present exciting opportunities for studying development and in vitro disease modeling. However, reported variability in iPSC behavior has called their utility into question. We therefore constituted a test set of 16 iPSCs lines from 7 individuals of varying gender and health status, characterized them extensively for pluripotency, and evaluated their ability to terminally differentiate. Using standardized procedures in two independent laboratories, 13 of the iPSC lines gave rise to functional motor neurons with a range of efficiencies similar to ESCs. Although three iPSC lines were resistant to neural differentiation, early neuralization rescued their performance. Therefore, all lines in the test set passed a stringent test of differentiation capacity despite variations in expression of early pluripotency markers, transgenes and karyotype. This novel iPSC/ESC test set is a robust resource for those interested in the basic biology of stem cells and their applications.