A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF NEURONAL DIFFERENTIATION
Researchers from IBG identified the molecular hallmarks of different stages of neuronal differentiation and published their results in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are stem cells that are generated from somatic cells in the lab. Researchers can obtain all differentiated adult cells from iPSCs. The technique eases and enables a broad range of applications and new investigations.
Prof. Dr. Esra ERDAL, group leader of Stem Cell and Organoid Technologies Lab at IBG, and Assoc. Prof. Gökhan KARAKÜLAH, head of IBG-BIP Bioinformatics Platform, along with their lab members Dr. Soheil AKBARI from Erdal Lab. and Doğa ESKİER and Ahmet BURSALI from IBG-BIP collaborated with Prof. Dr. Meltem KURUŞ from Izmir Katip Celebi University. The group investigated the transcriptional dynamics of human neuronal differentiation from iPSCs, in different stages. They used RNA sequencing technology and designed a comprehensive study that includes both protein coding genes and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA). LncRNAs are important regulatory factors in differentiation.
In their article, the researchers provide an overview of the coding and non-coding transcriptome during multiple stages of the iPSC-derived neuronal differentiation process. They found new regulatory lncRNAs that were not identified as regulatory in neuronal differentiation previously. They provide differentially expressed genes at each stage, as well as key genes of the neuronal differentiation network.
Their results are a valuable resource for future studies on neuronal differentiation.