Secondary NS from Cortex and spinal cord. Mus musculus

Neural stem cells (NSCs) can be isolated from different regions of the central nervous system. There has been controversy whether regional differences amongst stem and progenitor cells are cell intrinsic and whether these differences are maintained during expansion in culture. The identification of inherent regional differences has important implications for the use of these cells in neural repair. Here, we compared neural stem cells derived from the spinal cord and embryonic cortex. We found that while cultured cortical and spinal cord derived neural stem cells respond similarly to mitogens and are equally neuronogenic, they retain and maintain through multiple passages gene expression patterns indicative of the region from which they were isolated. Further microarray analysis identified 229 genes that were differentially expressed between cortical and spinal cord derived neurospheres. Keywords: stem cell comparison Overall design: Cortex and and spinal cords were isolated from embryonic day 14 cd1 mice and cultured ad neurospheres for 2 passages in EGF and bFGF. 3 independent sets of cultures serve as biological replicates with a dye flip control for each hybridization, for a total of 6 arrays.