Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Araúzo-Bravo, Marcos J

Titel

Computational Biology Methods for Characterization of Pluripotent Cells

Ist Teil von

• Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.), 2016-01, Vol.1357, p.195

Ort / Verlag

United States

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Pluripotent cells are a powerful tool for regenerative medicine and drug discovery. Several techniques have been developed to induce pluripotency, or to extract pluripotent cells from different tissues and biological fluids. However, the characterization of pluripotency requires tedious, expensive, time-consuming, and not always reliable wet-lab experiments; thus, an easy, standard quality-control protocol of pluripotency assessment remains to be established. Here to help comes the use of high-throughput techniques, and in particular, the employment of gene expression microarrays, which has become a complementary technique for cellular characterization. Research has shown that the transcriptomics comparison with an Embryonic Stem Cell (ESC) of reference is a good approach to assess the pluripotency. Under the premise that the best protocol is a computer software source code, here I propose and explain line by line a software protocol coded in R-Bioconductor for pluripotency assessment based on the comparison of transcriptomics data of pluripotent cells with an ESC of reference. I provide advice for experimental design, warning about possible pitfalls, and guides for results interpretation.