To develop a system for sorting and culturing single human iPS cells.

Project Gist

To develop a system for sorting and culturing single human iPS cells.

Keywords

Single cell culture, human iPS cell

Background, Purpose, and Project Achievements

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) hold great potential for applications in fundamental research and clinical use, such as cell-based therapies, tissue engineering, disease modeling and drug discovery/screening. However, there still remain some problems for the reprogramming of iPSCs, such as tumorigenic uncertainly due to mixture of good and bad cells. For medical applications, clinical-grade iPSCs must be produced in a defined and controllable manner. Thus, cell quality control will pay a necessary and challenging role. Integrated Nano- /Micro-engineered technology, we develop a single iPS cell sorting and culture system. This system is suited for long-term expansion of hiPSCs under feeder- and serum-free culture conditions. After 20 passages, Cells still maintains its pluripotency without introducing any abnormal chromosome.

Future Prospects

In this project, we proposed a simple system for single cell culture of hiPSCs. Our results show that those clones can effectively keep their pluripotency as well as their capability of self-renewal. However, gene expression analysis have shown that some genes could have different expression levels among different clones, indicating that the individual cells may have different characters even in a same colony. In the future, more investigation are necessary for understanding how individual hiPSCs would have different self-renewal or differentiation properties.

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Principal Investigator