A non-invasive method to determine the pluripotent status of stem cells by culture medium microRNA expression detection

To precisely determine the type and status of cells is an important prerequisite for basic researches and regenerative medicine involving stem cells or differentiated cells. However, the traditional destructive cell status examination methods have many limitations, mainly due to the heterogeneity of cells under the reprogramming or differentiation/trans-differentiation process. Here we present a new method to non-destructively determine the pluripotent level of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), or the types of differentiated cells. The method is achieved by examining the expression profiles of microRNAs (miRNAs) in cell culture medium, which show consistent abundance trend as those of the cellular miRNAs. Therefore, the method enables status examination and afterward application being achieved on the same population of cells, which will greatly facilitate cell reprogramming or differentiation/trans-differentiation related based research and clinical therapy.