Farewell to Assays? Researchers Create Web-based Tool for Determining Pluripotency in Human Stem Cells

In an effort to create a cheaper, faster, and animal-free method for determining pluripotency in stem cells, an international research team has developed a web-based test that helps investigators determine whether their cell lines are pluripotent based on their gene expression profiles.

"Many scientists are unhappy" with the teratoma assay, Jeanne Loring, a Scripps Research molecular biologist and one of the authors of the study, said in a statement. The method can take six to eight weeks to get results, she noted, and is also "technically challenging and difficult to standardize." PluriTest uses two related classifiers: The "pluripotency score," which indicates whether a query sample contains a pluripotent signature; and the "novelty score," which measures how far the stem cells in a query sample deviate from the normal pluripotent stem cell lines.

Simply put, "you upload raw data to the website and it tells you if your cell line is pluripotent or not and it's also got some information about ... interesting patterns in the gene expression profile," Franz-Josef Mueller, a researcher at the Center for Integrative Psychiatry in Kiel, Germany, and a co-author on the paper, told BioInform.

Source: A bioinformatic assay for pluripotency in human cells (NATURE METHODS)

• Franz-Josef Müller,
• Bernhard M Schuldt,
• Roy Williams,
• Dylan Mason,
• Gulsah Altun,
• Eirini P Papapetrou,
• Sandra Danner,
• Johanna E Goldmann,
• Arne Herbst,
• Nils O Schmidt,
• Josef B Aldenhoff,
• Louise C Laurent
• & Jeanne F Loring

Treatment breakthrough for rare disease linked to diabetes

University of Manchester scientists have led an international team to discover new treatments for a rare and potentially lethal childhood disease that is the clinical opposite of diabetes mellitus. Congenital hyperinsulinism (CHI) is a condition where the body's pancreas produces too much insulin – rather than too little as in diabetes – so understanding the disease has led to breakthroughs in diabetes treatment.

Current drug treatments for CHI often fail in the most severe forms of the disease and the patient has to have some, or most, of their pancreas removed. The Manchester researchers discovered that treating cells under specially modified conditions helped to recover the function of the internal switches that control insulin release. Through these experiments the team have provided the first evidence that the outcomes of gene defects can be reversed in human insulin-producing cells.

Source : @EurekAlert, Content