Clonal Genetic and Hematopoietic Heterogeneity among Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell lines

Induced pluripotent stem cells hold great promise for modeling human hematopoietic diseases. However, intrinsic variability in the capacities of different iPSC lines for hematopoietic development complicates comparative studies and is currently unexplained. We created and analyzed three separate iPSC clones from fibroblasts of three different normal individuals using a standardized approach that included excision of integrated reprogramming genes by Cre-Lox mediated recombination. Gene expression profiling and hematopoietic differentiation assays showed that independent lines from the same individual were generally more similar to each other than those from different individuals.