Genome-wide analysis of three clonal neural stem cell lines derived from human foetal spinal cord tissue.. Homo sapiens

Stem cells have received substantial interest both for their potential as in vitro tools to study development and as potential therapeutic agents in a range of degenerative diseases of the nervous system. We have generated clonal neural stem cell lines from human foetal spinal cord conditionally immortalised with 4-hydroxy tamoxifen inducible cMyc (cMycERTAM), and performed a detailed assessment of their identity in terms of their expression of homeodomain transcription factors and their capacity to generate particular neuronal subtypes of the spinal cord. These lines retain a ventral spinal cord progenitor phenotype and give rise to electrically active neuronal subtypes characteristic of specific ventral progenitor subdomains. Upon grafting into lesioned rat spinal cord these cells differentiate into ChAT+ve motorneurons and show robust survival after 4 months. Overall design: Total RNA was obtained from three proliferative undifferentiated neural stem cell lines at 75% confluence in culture. Two replicates of each clonal line were generated for microarray analysis.