Generation of Integration-free Induced Neural Stem Cells from Mouse Fibroblasts. Mus musculus

Recent studies demonstrated that fibroblasts could be converted into induced neural stem cells (iNSCs). However, the insertional mutation caused by random integration of viral vectors has been a major limitation of iNSCs for the future clinical translation. Here we show that non-viral transfection of episomal vectors encoding Brn4/Pou3f4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc sufficiently generates iNSCs. The episomal vector mediated iNSCs closely resemble brain-derived NSCs as well as iNSCs generated by retrovirus in morphology, gene expression profile, epigenetic status, self-renewal capacity and both in vitro and in vivo differentiation capacity. The novel conversion protocol defined in the current study offers a method for generating integration-free iNSCs for the clinical research Overall design: we developed a novel method for generating integration-free iNSCs. We demonstrated that oriP/EBNA1-based episomal vectors could generate iNSCs by single transfection