Stem Cell Biology

Stem cells have the ability to generate every cell in the body. Elucidating this process will have a profound impact on our understanding of animal development and will help produce therapies to regenerate damaged and diseased tissues. Because cell differentiation often involves a dramatic metamorphosis of the stem cell into a committed cell lineage, the ImageStream is ideally suited for these types of studies. Whether by measuring the location of proteins that help stem cells maintain pluripotency or by quantifying signaling events that lead toward differentiation down a committed cell line, the ability of the ImageStream to analysis large numbers of cells simplifies identification and classification of rare stem cell populations.

Octamer binding protein expression in stem cells

Octamer binding proteins are believed to allow cycling stem cells to remain in a pluripotent state. Understanding how stem cells can proliferate without committing to a cell lineage can help produce stable cell lines of progenitor cells as well as describe the biology of differentiation.

Here we quantify the expression pattern of Oct34 (orange) in CD9 (green) positive stem cells.

Erythroid differentiation

As hematopoeitc stem cells differentiate through the erythroid lineage, they shrink and eventually enucleate as they progress towards becoming RBC. They also progressively gain expression of glycophorinA and lose CD71 expression. The extruded nuclei express low levels of glycophorinA on their membranes. This experiment demonstrates the unique ability of the ImageStream to classify cells using a combination of intensity, morphology, and location based parameters.