Abstract
Impaired axonal development and degeneration are implicated in many debilitating disorders, such as hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and periphery neuropathy. Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have provided researchers with an excellent resource for modeling human neuropathologic processes including axonal defects in vitro. There are a number of steps that are crucial when developing an hPSC-based model of a human disease, including generating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), differentiating those cells to affected cell types, and identifying disease-relevant phenotypes. Here, we describe these steps in detail, focusing on the neurodegenerative disorder HSP.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Spastic Paraplegia Foundation and a Connecticut Stem Cell Research Grant (11SCB24).
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Denton, K.R., Xu, CC., Li, XJ. (2014). Modeling Axonal Phenotypes with Human Pluripotent Stem Cells. In: Nagy, A., Turksen, K. (eds) Patient-Specific Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Models. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1353. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/7651_2014_167
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/7651_2014_167
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