Picture Blog: Naive Human Pluripotent Stem Cells Regrown From Allele’s iPSCs

As we blogged a month ago, the Hanna lab recently published a paper in Nature describing that human ESCs or iPSCs, which typically resemble more of mouse EpiSCs (epiblast stem cells) than ground state mouse stem cells, could be converted to naïve pluripotent stem cells if grown in a stem cell medium that includes hLIF, JNKi, and p38i.  The figure here shows that the reported system did perform well when we at Allele Biotech tested growing our banked iPSCs under similar conditions.  The colonies grown in naive stem cell conditions (B) did become dome-shaped when cultured for longer period of time; when transferred back into regular stem cell medium, the once naive-looking iPSCs formed tighter and “cleaner” colonies than typical “primed” human iPSC colonies.

A, Primed human stem cells: mRNA-iPSC line J-1 grown on CellStar-coated surface and in E8 medium. The cells have human iPSC morphology of being compact in size and in "shiny" colonies. B, Naïve human stem cells: J-1 iPSCs shown 2 days after switching to a medium similar to the Naïve Human Stem cell Medium (NHSM). Compared to primed stem cells in A, the naïve stem cells are more flat and transparent, with no spontaneous differentiation on the edges.