Differentiation of human amniotic fluid kidney progenitor cells into podocytes and comparison with human conditionally immortalized podocytes

In this work, we isolated and characterized a novel cell population derived from human amniotic fluid cells (hAKPC-P), and we differentiated them into podocytes. We used microarrays to study global changes in gene expression before and after differentiation in hAKPC-P and human immortalized podocytes (hIPod, positive control) and performed a detailed comparison between the different populations hAKPC-P were isolated by FACS sorting from the total human amniotic fluid cell population and differentiated into podocytes using VRADD media. Morphological, phenotypical and functional analysis were performed to assess their differentiation. To confirm the results, cells were compared with human conditionally immortalized podocytes.