Dys and Eureprogramming

Pluripotent stem cells have the potential to differentiate in vitro in many, if not all, functional cell types. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) have recently emerged as a reproducible model of pluripotent stem cells that can be generated from post-natal tissues. To understand this process at the transcriptome level, we generated iPS cell lines, partially reprogrammed cell lines and compared their transcriptome with that of the partental human foreskin fibroblasts and human embryonic stem cell lines. Four categories of samples, comprising human foreskin fibroblasts, fully reprogrammed iPS cell lines, partially reprogrammed iPS cell lines and human embryonic stem cell lines were compared using Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM). These data were also compared to a compendium of differentiated human samples and a pluripotency classifier was computed.