'recipe' for growing stem cells
Researchers at Yale have established the minimal nutritional requirements for growing and maintaining human embryonic stem cells, a "recipe" that is critical for clinical application and for developmental studies, according to an early online report this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) divide continuously over many generations and have the potential to differentiate into many different cell types. For hESCs to be useful in the clinic, the nutrient mix they are grown in must be free of components that may contain toxins, viruses or materials that might cause an immune response.
Led by Michael Snyder, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, the team of researchers has documented a simple mix they call "hESC cocktail," or HESCO, that contains only purified recombinant, chemically-synthesized or purified human factors to support the cell growth.
The researchers based success of the "recipe" on how well the hESCs were able to preserve their growth characteristics and stem cell markers. To be successful, the "cocktail" also had to maintain normal cell chromosome profiles, or karyotypes, in the cells and fully support the ability of the cells to differentiate.
"Use of a minimal medium that is sufficient for the embryonic stem cell growth is expected to make clinical application possible and facilitate developmental studies," according to Jean Lu, a postdoctoral associate and first author on the paper. "Cells incubated in HESCO are easy to grow in an undifferentiated state and can be readily induced to differentiate into all the three basic cell lineages."
The final cocktail for HESCO, that actively supports hESC self-renewal, contains the growth factor Wnt3, basic fibroblast growth factor, insulin, transferrin, the
B-cell activating factor April/BAFF, cholesterol and albumin.
Co-authors on the paper were Carmen Jane Booth and Shih-Hung Yang from Yale and Runhua Hou from the Hospital of Saint Raphael. This work was supported by grants from the Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health. Yale's Office of Cooperative Research (OCR) manages intellectual assets created at the University, and a patent application covering this subject matter has been filed. Further information on licensing agreements is available at ocr@yale.edu or at www.yale.edu/ocr/.
-- By Janet Rettig Emanuel
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