The global gene expression profiling of the earliest phase of the differentiation of human embryonic stem cells into classical brown adipocytes

Although brown adipocyte (BA) is known to be derived from Myf5-positive myoblasts, its earlier developmental process remains unknown. To understand its pre-myoblastic developmental pathway, human embryonic stem cells (KhES-3) were subjected to a directed differentiation into BA using multiple culture dishes at a time. Cells were harvested from each dish with an interval of 2 to 6 hours and total RNA was extracted for the analyses. RNA samples were collected totally at 19 time points during the 72-hour differentiation culture. All samples were subjected to microarray analyses.