Directed differentiation of functional astroglial subtypes from human pluripotent stem cells

SnapShot: Directed Differentiation of Pluripotent Stem Cells

Directed Differentiation of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells to Microglia

Microglia, the immune cells of the brain, are crucial to proper development and maintenance of the CNS, and their involvement in numerous neurological disorders is increasingly being recognized. To improve our understanding of human microglial biology, we devised a chemically defined protocol to generate human microglia from pluripotent stem cells. Myeloid progenitors expressing CD14/CX3CR1 wer...

Differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into functional cells

Introduction Generation of functional cells from human pluripotent stem cells is the key for their application. Here, we review representative differentiation protocols of human pluripotent stem cells into neural and cardiac lineages. These protocols can be divided into three groups: embryoid body formation, monolayer culture and coculture with stromal cells. The former two are the mainstream m...

Differentiation Potential of Nestin (+) and Nestin (-) Cells Derived from Human Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells into Functional Insulin Producing Cells

The feasibility of isolating and manipulating mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) from human patients provides hope for curing numerous disease and disorders. Recent phenotypic analysis showed heterogeneity of MSCs. A nestin progenitor cell is a subpopulation within MSCs which plays a role in pancreas regeneration during embryogenesis. This study aimed to separate nestin (+) cells from human bone mar...

Rapid, Directed Differentiation of Retinal Pigment Epithelial Cells from Human Embryonic or Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

We describe a robust method to direct the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells into retinal pigment epithelial cells (RPE). The purpose of providing a detailed and thorough protocol is to clearly demonstrate each step and to make this readily available to researchers in the field. This protocol results in a homogenous layer of RPE with minimal or no manual dissection needed. The method pre...