Essential Role of Adhesion GPCR, GPR123, for Human Pluripotent Stem Cells and Reprogramming towards Pluripotency.

G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the largest family of cell surface receptors. They modulate key physiological functions and are required in diverse developmental processes including embryogenesis, but their role in pluripotency maintenance and acquisition during the reprogramming towards hiPSCs draws little attention. Meanwhile, it is known that more than 106 GPCRs are overexpressed in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs).

Prognostic Analysis of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells Based on Their Morphological Portrait and Expression of Pluripotent Markers.

The ability of human pluripotent stem cells for unlimited proliferation and self-renewal promotes their application in the fields of regenerative medicine. The morphological assessment of growing colonies and cells, as a non-invasive method, allows the best clones for further clinical applications to be safely selected. For this purpose, we analyzed seven morphological parameters of both colonies and cells extracted from the phase-contrast images of human embryonic stem cell line H9, control human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) line AD3, and hiPSC line HPCASRi002-A (CaSR) in various passages during their growth for 120 h.