Directed Dopaminergic Neuron Differentiation 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...

Reprogramming by cytosolic extract of human embryonic stem cells improves dopaminergic differentiation potential of human adipose tissue-derived stem cells

The extract of pluripotent stem cells induces dedifferentiation of somatic cells with restricted plasticity. In this study, we used the extract of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) to dedifferentiate adipose tissue-derived stem cells (ADSCs) and examined the impact of this reprogramming event on dopaminergic differentiation of the cells. For this purpose, cytoplasmic extract of ESCs was prepare...

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...

High-efficiency motor neuron differentiation from human pluripotent stem cells and the function of Islet-1.

Efficient derivation of large-scale motor neurons (MNs) from human pluripotent stem cells is central to the understanding of MN development, modelling of MN disorders in vitro and development of cell-replacement therapies. Here we develop a method for rapid (20 days) and highly efficient (~70%) differentiation of mature and functional MNs from human pluripotent stem cells by tightly modulating ...