WIKIMEDIA, CSIRO
An international team of scientists has characterized and made available 711 induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines from 301 healthy individuals, according to a paper published today (May 10) in Nature. The researchers also investigated sources of variability within these banked cell lines, a common characteristic of existing iPSC lines that can pose challenges for researchers.
“Many other efforts to create stem cells focus on rare diseases. In our study, stem cells have been produced from hundreds of healthy volunteers to study common genetic variation,” said Fiona Watt, lead author and Director of the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at King's College London, in a press release.
Because the researchers derived more than one cell line from individual participants, they were able to demonstrate that “up to 46 percent of the differences we saw in iPS cells were due to differences between individuals,” Watt said, indicating that genetic differences between people drives variation in ...
