Highlight report perspectives in stem cell resear

Authors: Ahmed Ghallab

Publish Date: 2015/09/26

Volume: 89, Issue: 11, Pages: 2185-2187

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Abstract

In vitro systems represent a cuttingedge topic in toxicology Grinberg et al 2014 Frey et al 2014 Godoy et al 2013 Godoy 2011 Stewart and Marchan 2014 Particularly in the fields of liver Godoy et al 2013 Zellmer et al 2010 Godoy and Bolt 2012 kidney Faiz et al 2015 Yang et al 2014 and neurotoxicity Zimmer et al 2014 Waldmann et al 2014 Krug et al 2013 in vitro systems are frequently used Primary human cells still represent a gold standard in toxicological research Heise et al 2012 Ghallab 2013 2014a b However their use is hampered by difficult availability Hewitt et al 2007 Hengstler et al 2000Theoretically stem cells offer a possibility to overcome this limitation However it is discussed controversially to which degree stem cellderived cells resemble primary cells In the field of stem cellderived hepatocytelike cells some authors reported that generation of ‘functional’ ‘high fidelity’ hepatocytes from stem and precursor cells is already possible Medine et al 2013 Szkolnicka et al 2014 Huang et al 2014 while others present a more critical point of view Morris et al 2014 Hengstler et al 2005 Brulport et al 2007Today genomewide analyses either by RNAseq or gene array are fast and relatively cheap They allow an unbiased analysis and the nature of the analyzed cells can be quantitatively described This also allows identification of unwanted features such as induction of colon genes Moreover transcription factors responsible for ‘unwanted side effects’ of current hepatocyte differentiation protocols will be identified Although numerous studies about hepatocyte differentiation have been published the feature of unwanted colon differentiation remained unnoticed until recently Software for analysis of genomewide data such as CellNet or clustering as well as overrepresentation analysis tools is free and publicly available further facilitating the application of unbiased genomewide techniques

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