Using Ion Proton System to ID Novel Neural Tissue Differentiation Markers

Injuries and diseases of the brain and spinal cord continue to be a significant health challenge. However, patient-derived stem cells that can be differentiated into neural tissue may make regenerative medicine a possibility in the future.

Current methods for cell typing cannot discriminate among the more than 100,000 likely types of nerve cells. Research using RNA-Seq was used to demonstrate the ability to determine new cellular markers of neuronal differentiation, a team from Thermo Fisher Scientific used the Ion PI™ Chip to define temporal transcription characteristics in these archived stem cells.

This work was presented in a poster at the annual meeting of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Differential expression of 25 miRNAs and 10,000 transcripts were shown. The poster, RNA-Seq To Identify Novel Markers For Neural Tissue Differentiation, can be accessed online.