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The same, but different
The development of human induced pluripotent stem cells (HiPSCs) has been hailed as a great ethical step forwards in regenerative medicine, because in principle these cells reduce the need to obtain andstudy human embryonic stem cells (HESCs). However, three papers published in Nature indicate that these cell types are not the same at the genomic and the epigenomiclevels.
Previous studies have indicated that HiPSCs harbour regions of gene amplification and loss, despite the fact that, biologically, these cells behave identically to HESCs. These aberrations can be lost during prolonged culture in vitro and are not dependent on the methods used to produce the HiPSCs. These findings have been verified and extended by Samer Hussein, Nizar Batada and colleagues in early and intermediate
HiPSCs, the fibroblasts from which they were derived, and HESCs. They used high-resolution
single nucleotide polymorphism arrays to investigate copy number variations (CNVs). The early passage...