Proteomics Profiling of Cellular Reprogramming: Are Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (hiPSCs) Indistinguishable from Human Embryonic Stem Cells (hESCs)?

<p><em>presented in: ASMS 2010 in Salt Lake City, Utah</em></p> <p> </p> <p>“Are iPS cells indistinguishable from ES cells?”<br>We prole the proteomes of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) with quantitative dimethyllabeling developed in-house to unravel the similarities and dierences between the two cell lines. Our results show that both pluripotent cell lines are nearly indistinguishable at the proteome level.</p> <p>Being self-renewing and pluripotent, hESCs hold great promise for cell transplantation therapies to cure degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease or heart failures. However, this technology is limited by ethical issues since embryos are inevitably destroyed upon derivation of hESCs. Besides, potential risks do exist for immune rejection posttransplantion. These issues can probably be addressed now by the reprogramming<br>technology where adult somatic cells are induced to become hESC-like by the ectopic expression of dened transcription factors. These induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) closely resemble hESCs in many aspects, such as the expression of certain stem cell markers. More importantly, they are also capable of pluripotency and self-renewal.</p> <p>Being patient-derived and thus patient-specic, hiPSCs are ideal replacements for hESCs in cell transplantation therapies. However, before any clinical applications, they need to be characterized extensively so as to evaluate their abilities for replication and dierentiation in comparison to the actual hESCs.</p> <p>More recently, transcriptomic approaches have been used to assess the gene expression proles of both cell types. We argue that mRNA levels are not truly representative of the true character of a cell as proteins are the actual functional entities. Therefore, we used “proteomics profiling” instead and ask “Are iPS cells indistinguishable from ES cells?”</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p