NGS: a ramp up for Stem Cells?

NGS techniques are rapidly changing many aspects of the research world. Their wide potential applications are many and probably not all are already known.On the new Nature Biotechnology issue (January 2012), N.D. DeWitt et al describe one of the most challenging and interesting support that NGS techniques can offer in biomedical research: an engagement in the Stem Cell field. “There is an urgent need”, DeWitt says, “to ramp up the efforts to establish stem cell as a leading model system for understanding human biology and disease states.” Several analysis on human iPS cells (hiPSCs) and on human ES cells (hESCs) detected structural and sequence variations under some culture conditions. It is not yet clear if these variations are present in the original cell (for hiPSCs) or if they are due to the process of deriving cells or even to the culture conditions. What is clear is the need to understand what causes the variations and to determine what kind of changes in cellular behaviour these variations lead to.

Furthermore, it is important to note that hESCs and iPSCs offer a controlled cellular system for the mapping of molecular changes during development and differentiation. It is also well known that cellular and gene expression pathways implicated in cancer are increasingly found to be active in ESCs.

Next-generation sequencing technology will be fundamental for moving these critical studies forward, and will represent a powerful tool to deepen our knowledge on genomics, epigenomics and transcriptome changes that occur in hESCs and hiPSCs.