ISSCR Annual Meeting 2024

Join Qkine and over 4000 scientists from around the world at ISSCR 2024 in Hamburg to be part of the best and brightest stem cell event of the year. The ISSCR meeting is the most comprehensive gathering in stem cell research and a hub for discovery, collaboration and innovation in the field.

Visit our team on stand #1009 to learn more about how our portfolio of animal-free bioactive proteins can enhance your stem cell research. We will also be giving you the chance to play our game to win prizes.

We are also offering an exclusive Qkine goody bag for customers who sign up for our monthly newsletter before June 30th 2024. Sign up below to reserve your goody bag to collect on the stand.

Learn more about the ISSCR annual meeting below.

ISSCR travel grant award winner

Sara Bianchi – Bertero Lab, University of Turin

As part of our commitment to support the development of stem cell and organoid researchers, we announced a competition for an individual to win a travel grant to attend ISSCR 2024 in Hamburg.

We are delighted to award our ISSCR travel grant to Sara Bianchi, a second-year bachelor’s student studying Biotechnology at the University of Turin in Italy. She is training in using hiPSC models to study cardiac development and disease.

Sara has distinguished herself both for her excellent grades and for having already started a voluntary internship in the Bertero lab.

Poster abstract

High quality and reproducible hiPSCs culture is key for several applications such as investigating the mechanisms of differentiation in various cell types. Experimental results are influenced by the media used, which has proved to have an impact on morphology, metabolism, and cell cycle. To better define these differences, we compared the transcriptomic profile of the characterized WTC11 male healthy donor hiPSCs line grown in commercial Essential 8 (cE8) and in two different in-house media: homemade Essential 8 (hE8) and the recently developed 88 formula (which substitutes TGFβ-3 instead of TGFβ-1 and adds NRG1).

For both hE8 and 88, we adopted a commercially available source of animal-free thermostable FGF2: a 145 amino acid truncated variant of FGF2-G3 (patented for commercial use by Enantis/Masaryk University). We performed bulk RNA sequencing on three biological replicates of hiPSCs adapted to culture in each medium for five passages. Principal component analysis clustered the replicates for the three media, confirming culture and data reproducibility. We performed gene ontology and gene set enrichment analyses for differentially expressed genes. Cells grown in 88 appear to be primed towards mesoderm as indicated by upregulation in heart, muscle, blood vessels, and kidney developmental processes.

On the opposite side, cE8 hiPSC seem to be primed for neuronal development, as their transcriptomes are instead enriched for genes involved in neurogenesis, nervous system processes, and neurotransmitters secretion; molecular function enrichments confirm a higher expression of ion channels. hE8 grown hiPSCs appear to be unbiased. By analysing the pluripotency signaling pathways we found a significant upregulation of Nodal and BMP4 in 88, and of Wnt signaling in cE8 and hE8, that overall seem to have the most comparable transcriptomic profiles. We also analysed the differences in cell cycle propensity by calculating the score of each phase using marker genes; cells grown in 88 seem to have a lower rate of proliferation. These results were also extended by proliferation assays carried out with the Click-iT EdU kit. Concluding, while cE8, hE8 and 88 all maintain pluripotency, they induce subtle changes in transcriptomes that are reminiscent of epiblast regionalization and could influence downstream applications.